Thanks to vdub_bobby I fixed the ball routine so that it no longer pokes over the top - and it doesn't wait until when a sprite is suppose to start drawing before working. To keep timing in the HBLANK however I had to modify the way the player appears. Instead of being a pure strip we now have a dual-colored box! The colors naturally changing based on the colors of the sprites currently on the screen.

Doing this caused an unnoticed semantic bug to stare me in the face.

Notice the extra thickness of the bottom? That should not be like that and in fact it's only like that half of the time. The stripped color of the playfield made it easy to find the cause. The problem was in the StopPlayer line. All 3 branches of this section are suppose to fall into the appropriate AfterPlayer Zone after completing one line. However the "Line2" variant, which is responsible for testing the LinesRemaining to the zone and branch to either UpdatePlayfield or NoNewPlayfield lines jumped back to the StopPlayer versions. This caused it to do one more line of displaying the player's outer box before jumping properly to AfterPlayer to turn it off.

Beta 2 actually has this fixed.

The only problem now is with the sprites. I must be using SkipDraw incorrectly which would cause it to either never trigger (always skip and load #0) or it's reading the wrong place in rom that just always happens to have 0's...

And I don't know what it could be.

If it's loading from somewhere else in ROM it should end up loading $FF's instead of 0's since in my experience so far with DASM that's what it seems to stuff into unused bytes. And I don't have any large segments of 0's placed in the rom. But I know it's at least triggering at the right time - roughly.

The delay we saw in the previous version when the ball's VDEL was taking 30% of the screen to turn on? That was the line that one of the items -should- have started displaying. I hardcoded one to start drawing at (40,40) in the gamefield window. (Status Bar lines aren't counted.) The other was due to start at (130,130) but obviously we wouldn't have noticed anything special with that one.

Guess tonight I study the math behind Skipdraw. I also have to double check the VDEL settings for P1 and P0 to make sure what I have set is still valid now that I've moved the GRP1 and GRP0's. At worst I'd just have to switch them around.

Here's the fixed beta2 for version 0.009. The only thing left to do for this version is fix the sprites so they'll display properly.