To bank or not to bank?
One thing I was pondering recently while evaluating the feasibility of the Wormy project is the question of whether to shoot for a 4K or a banked cartridge. Certainly during the heyday of the 2600, 8K and even 16K carts were hardly uncommon, and yet there is a certain 'purist' side of me that favors 4K. How should one best decide?To be sure, there's nothing that prevents going to a banked cartridge after starting out planning a 4K one. It only took a couple hours to split Strat-O-Gems from one 4K section to two just-over-2K sections, and a lot of that was figuring out how to make all my tools happy (including hacking my table generator to produce two sets of tables), and I don't think the design of Strat-O-Gems was adversely affected by the "late" switch. Something like Wormy, however, could be another matter.In Wormy, as in many 2600 projects, there are tradeoffs among code space, cycles, and RAM usage. Cycles generally aren't much of a question (code is either fast enough or it isn't), but RAM may be. Spending 1K of code unrolling a loop to save two bytes of RAM is probably not practical on a 4K cartridge, but on an 8K cartridge it's probably okay and on a 16K cartridge it almost certainly is.How do people decide what size cart to shoot for, and how to choose between cutting back on a game or going to a larger cart?
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