It's that mindless tireless time of mine to work on my Colecovision projects. I never ever stop obsessing about video game limitation. It one thing to put me to sleep thinking of games running on lesser console. I even made mock-up screen shot of games demake for the Colecovision. I went far as programmed a slideshow of the mockup I made. That ROM is almost 32 KB only 4KB left. I have to finished Rygar Mockup and Actraiser Act 2 level. Then make sprites for the scenes.

I just updated the SDCC stuff to 3.2.0a and got the latest devkit from Newcoleco website. I finally got it working. There's a few changes I discovered. The screen is off at default. The Screen_mode_2_text changed instead of loading one pattern table, you have to load pattern 3 times to 0x0000,0x0800,0x1000. This fix the sprite mirroring issue when using sprite 8-31.

Before discovering the changes, I used Mockup program first as the first program to be compiled by the new kit. After compiling and linking, started the rom. I got the blank screen. I was thinking I have to treak around with the program to get it to work. An hour later, I decided to try compiling my box game. I got picture, but the patterns were not copied to 0x0800, 0x1000. I knew about the problem since I did bring it up on the forum but didn't update the kit then. Then I decided to try Milon Mockup program which has the vdp register fix in it, no picture. That rules out the 28KB mock-up program not working due to it being too big. Then eventually, I typed screen_on(); and it displays the picture. Yay! Then I loaded the patterns into bank 0x0800,0x1000. Adding the screen_on() to the big mock-up fixed that one. I fixed the pattern table in that one.

I have the font in upper and lower case and usually load it into 0x0000, then use the other half to swap in graphics 0x0400. With the fixed Screen_mode_2_text I can load the font and graphics in this sequence.

rle2vram(font,0x0000);

rle2vram(graphic,0x0400);

rle2vram(font,0x0800);

rle2vram(graphic,0x0C00);

rle2vram(font,0x1000);

rle2vram(graphic,0x1400);

I will tinker with the programs tomorrow.