02.28.08
Huzzah!
After I wrote my last post, I started thinking about GTE again, so I had to do a little bit of hacking and fixed the memory alignment bug that I described. It’s not much, but the ToolSet Allocation and Initialization code appears to be working and I can finally peck away at getting the tile and sprite routines wrapped up and tested.
I probably shouldn’t have rewrote the sprite dispatch code a while back, but it just seemed logical to make the changes since I had to rewrite a lot of things in order to use the ToolSet Direct Page for variable storage rather than allocating the memory from the stack. The changes were for the best since the sprite dispatch became a bit faster and scales with the number of sprites per line a bit better, but it’s always had to get motivated to debug new and gnarly code.
I’ve actually been giving some thought to imposing a restriction of the sprite sizes in order to speed up the code. Most of the late 80’s-era video game systems — which GTE is targeting — restrict the sprites to be something like 8×8, 16×8, 24×16, etc. It probably wouldn’t make much difference since the sprites are compiled anyway. More annoying than productive.