Bob, I think you are definitely on the right track here.
Oystron and Rescue are examples of writing games to avoid flicker, and
constraining sprite position and motion in the process. That's fine, but
it limits the horizons of gameplay possible on the 2600.
Flicker is the other programming strategy for the 2600, and it frees up a
lot of territory for the 2600.
I have the source code of Solaris and Star Wars:TAC which are two games
which are paragons of intelligent sprite flicker and reuse.
I was thinking that not until I clear these for distribution that anyone
would come up with similar routines, and it's good that you are figuring
it out on your own, even though it may be a case of reinventing the wheel.
It would be interesting comparing kernels...
Odds are that the Solaris kernel is too much of a memory hog, anyway. SW
is an 8K game but each section fits in less than 4K. The trench sequence
was assembled to test on 4K EPROMs (which I have here on loan) so the
kernel is small enough for our purposes.
The SW kernel might make a good foundation for other color vector ports.
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