Chris:
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Ah...question answered. My heart greives for all those carts.
Anyone have a new cart case design read to go? Junie? Weren't you
working on this? (If Junie doesn't read this list, could someone
forward this question?)
Eduardo Mello talked to that company in Brazil that had carts on their
website. They said they can make them and I can't remember how much they
were, but they were really cheap. He's supposed to be getting a sample to
see what type of board will fit inside.
Glen:
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Can't you mirror data in all your banks so you won't have to flip as
often? The other required data that isn't as large might fit in the same
bank as the main level data.
I've done that a little bit, but for the most part the data and routines
are just too big. I'm hoping to fit about 20 levels which (the way I'm
doing it) is a huge amount of data if I allow for 8-10 screens per
level. And music with my music driver tends to eat space fast. Believe it
or not, I'm actually hurting for space even with 32K!
Thomas:
-------
At least, you have some "horizontal separation", so you can move around the
writes to GRPx quite a lot.
BTW: You aren't using VDELPx, right?
Yes, it makes it a lot easier. I'm not using VDEL.
I wonder why you haven't annoted the total timings inside the kernel. How do
you know, at which line-cycle a eg. PF-register write happens? When you remove
the last WSYNCs in your code, IMO that will become a problem.
I can just tell where the cycles fall by looking at the screen. I've
become an expert at trial and error. I changed the kernal so much that I
got tired of recounting cycles.
now that your kernel is getting that tight and you probably have to make
compromises, have you ever considered to allow black lines in the
playfield (like Surround does)? With only a single line out of 13, you
perhaps would get enough cycles to solve all problems. And IMO those
lines don't look bad, they somehow make the graphic looking even better
(e.g. H.E.R.O. is using a similar effect).
It's worth trying. I'll see how it looks.
Any maybe you could load the playfield data from ROM and the marble
data from RAM. Together with the idea above that might give you some
extra possibilities.
There's no way I'm going to fit all the playfield and color data in one
bank, so I'd have to have two banks with kernals. Plus I don't think I'm
up for rewriting the kernal and level setup at this point. I'm worn out
from programming this thing. Making a 2600 game is just sooo much work. :oP
-Paul
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