Waiting for a system update to finish so I can sleep, when I know full well it can finish without me... but I remembered this existed and figured I should post! How will I ever become a famous blogger?
Sadly not a lot to report since March! We've got Cool Herders off to the publisher, just waiting for Piko to get everything set back up again. In the meantime, I finished Super Space Acer for the TI and ColecoVision, and those are off to ArcadeShopper and CollectorVision respectively - who I have heard back from are putting their packages together.
Apparently I need to take a few more screenshots! ;) Have a look at the teaser vid instead - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb0D47OZML8
(Boy, I really should update Youtube more often too...)
Since then I started on a Gameboy Advance port. My original attempt was to port my libti99 library... which I did achieve for the most part. I also got the music player working. The problem is the library is way too slow drawing the TI screen, so I'll probably have to skip 'partially working' and go straight to porting the graphics. The goal, and I still don't know if it's achievable, is to introduce a 3D perspective angle to deal with the reduced resolution.
I still want to port to a few other systems, but it's really needing to be higher priority than it is. So now we can get to the lesson part of this post...
DECIDE YOUR PRIORITIES.
Unfortunately I've let myself be distracted by TWO projects. Both I thought would be simple, and neither were.
The first was a port of a newcomer to the TI community's game - he wrote it for cartridge using Compiled BASIC, but though it loaded from cartridge it needed a floppy for support files. I adapted it to read the files from cart instead, using a simulation of the disk access code -- but then I foundered for a few days trying to fit it into memory. Turns out when he said he had 100 bytes free, he wasn't kidding! But I did succeed.
The other is a port of CVBasic to the TI. This is a BASIC compiler for the ColecoVision - and now most Z80+9918A computers. I noted they were looking at a port to the 6502-based Creativision, and I noted if they did that, I'd extend the scheme to the TI.
Well, they did, and so I started in. What originally looked like properly isolated code turned out to be thousands of lines of undocumented assembly language, and more assembly in almost every file. So this has been taking a very long time -- and indeed when I finish I am not even certain it is going to work. My original high hopes were dashed by this and at this point it's more stubbornness than interest that has me finishing the task. I expect, if I can get it to compile the test app, I will report the repo and leave it at that.
I can probably share the Github for that -- if you are interested you can follow the fork back to the original and see Oscar's original compiler. https://github.com/tursilion/CVBasic/tree/ti99
I am back to RL work these days, so maybe I'll have more to rant about soon ;)
