I've been trying to build up the scanline pairs for the first stage, the rest of it after that is generally an issue of copy/paste with a few modifications. I was topping out in cycles again so looked for ways to remove things from the kernel without removing anything from the kernel. I think I managed to do that although it cost a couple bytes of ram. By doing this it also freed up a lot of color selection choices for the playfield alterations.

As a result, hopefully I'll have version 0.009 written and if nothing else in the debug stage this weekend.

*update*

Now started on writing the display code proper. Got a long weekend, so in amongst cleaning out the game collection to see what works and what doesn't. (I'm not quite as Pro Quality as my apartment tells me I should be ) I may take the Model II genesis down to the local pawn shop if I can confirm it works and I have enough spare connectors for my Model I genesis and the like. A few other odds and ends that might get traded in as well. I noticed they had a "Heavy Sixer" for sale down there, but after getting a closer look at it, it looked to be a CX2600 instead. Not too surprised I guess. I may just trade those things in for some more 7800 and/or 5200 carts depending on what they have at the time. I'm already up to 8 games for the 7800. I don't see them very often.

As for the mentioned saved cycles above, I was altering the playfield color slightly in the hopes that it'd stand out a little more in the room. So we'd have 2 colors altering instead of just one for the entire screen. Is it really necessary? Not really. But darnit I wanna see it.

 lda PFColor
 eor #00001100
 sta PFColor

This is what I was doing every scanline. This format would keep the two altering colors the same hue but just vary their lum values slightly by toggling the same bits back and forth. I had bit 1 kept at 0 to make sure I could set it as a 1 and then use that for enabling missiles and the ball. That restriction saved the need of setting up the register since I always enabled the missiles or ball immediately after setting the playfield color. (Can't vdel the missiles after all.)

By adding a second byte of ram, I could define PFColor_Even and PFColor_Odd instead of just PFColor. I could then set those two colors when I load the room and simply do a lda PFColor_Even or lda PFColor_Odd based on which of the two scanlines I'm in for the 2-scanline kernel now being used. from 8 cycles to 3.

I know later on I'm going to end up with ram issues. Luckily in this game most items and monsters aren't going to be as ever-present like they are in certain other games.