Dmitry's Blog - Today's progress

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I implemented a copy charset routine in assembler. At first I tried to use the one from the basic listing, I tried to push things on the stack so they could be PLA'd back off in the right order, and be used by the original basic listing's ML subroutine. Didn't work, and ultimately just a bunch of .byte directive's is hardly readable code, so I decided to rewrite - using, of course, some help from the internet to get started.

Well that was the one part of the original game written in machine language, and yet when I did the rewrite, my copy charset routine is faster?!?...seems to be faster.

And the one thing where I was going to continue to use C (remember this is a C/assembly rewrite, even if I'm using assembly 90% of the time)...., the one area where I hoped C would be fast enough, was plotting the borders. Well even after optimizing that a little - C is dog slow, not only slow compared to assembly, but dog slow compared to the original basic....LOL. apparently using COLOR, PLOT and DRAWTO in a character mode worked pretty good in basic.

Today has been all weirdness and unexpected behavior, but nevertheless I did copy and modify the charset per the original code - so I did make progress on one of today's goals. But I'm feeling its enough for now.

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/648/entry-12957-todays-progress/