SkoolKid wrote:
It's been fascinating to follow your progress in this thread. One question, though (since I have no knowledge of 6502 assembly and couldn't figure out the answer myself): are you using the space-saving trick from Back to Skool of only storing the graphic data for the left-facing sprites (animatory states 0-127), and flipping it when needed to obtain the right-facing sprites (animatory states 128-255)?
I didn't know this was used in Back2Skool, to be honest
but I used it before on my Space:1999 game. However I dropped it in this case because I was afraid it could slow things down a bit too much.
When I started with all this I was not sure that I could give it the necessary speed in the drawing routines and flipping each byte (even with a table, as I did in Space:1999) was something I thought I could not afford.
But yeah... it would be a good idea.
Worst problem here is that only 6 bits per byte are used as screen data, so as I wanted to keep the same graphics as in the original (or nearly) I need to move more memory (4 bytes for a 24 pixel-wide sprite per row, instead of 3).