I've been continuing work on porting this, and have sell haggling done and quite a bit of the inventory code too. I was thinking tonight about the possibility of a non-VBXE port. I'm using VBXE for the 80 column display and the ability to bank in lots of memory. It's possible, if I can get the port done, that I could create a non-VBXE port using an Atarimax 8Mb cartridge, and at least a 256k memory expansion. I would have to drop some of the items probably (there are actually quite a few that are almost duplicates), and deal with the cave structure differently (maybe breaking it up into multiple expanded memory banks.) There is also of course, the 40 character screen, requiring quite a bit of re-coding. But there is also the possibility of using graphics instead, maybe antic mode 4.

That's a long ways off however, I'll get the VBXE text version done first, optimize it to an acceptable/playable level, maybe add some music, maybe some enhanced VBXE graphics and then go down the non-VBXE port road.

I guess you could ask why I don't just forget the whole VBXE port and just attempt the non-VBXE port right now? The answer is I'm not even sure the VBXE port is possible... About half-way into this, I think it is possible, but you never know, I may run out of memory. While there is lots of cartridge space left, and VBXE memory is fine too, there is serious lack of low memory needed for banking the cartridge and VBXE memory windows. Already I have had to do some basic optimization to free up some of the low memory.

Currently, my low memory (memory below $4000) looks like this:

Name                   Start     End    Size  Align----------------------------------------------------ZEROPAGE              000082  0000A4  000023  00001CODE                  000400  0018A6  0014A7  00001RODATA                0018A7  0019F0  00014A  00001DATA                  0019F1  001AFC  00010C  00001BSS                   001AFD  002941  000E45  00001BCODE                 002A00  0032A4  0008A5  00001

I haven't used much zeropage yet, but will probably end up filling that up when it comes time to optimize. BCODE is where my banking code lives, and the C stack is at $3800, so you can see things are getting tight. Those other segments are filled with C runtime, misc functions that I need in main memory all the time, and some game data and structures that make sense to keep there too (player stats, random functions, etc...) I haven't jettisoned the OS yet either, that could be done at some later time to gain more memory, but also then makes this XL/XE only (did VBXE ever get created for an 800?)