Xe03 Spectrum

Mike has been pestering me to put up an in-progress picture, and I have to emphasise that this is very much in-progress (including programmer art).

Basically this shows the scrolling area being redrawn every frame with a sprite being rendered on top (actually it is currently 4 sprites in the same position).

The border colours are showing how long is being taken for the 2 routines (Cyan is the scroll render and red is the sprite drawing). So the scroll render is taking around 2/3rds of a full frame and we are only rendering the top 2/3rds of the screen (128 pixels).

I've been talking tactics with Mike and I've had to rethink some things over the weekend as the Z80 was just not fast enough for what I was thinking... it really take some time to readjust to how little can really be done by these processors, we really are spoiled by current machines!

I still have to write the processing part of the scrolling which will create the code to render the screen and rotate the tiles of the actual screen, but we have already decided that the game will run in 2 frames (i.e. it will update at 25fps, the same as the Plus/4 and the C64) so I have plenty of time.

Mike also pointed out that the 128K Spectrum would allow me to double buffer the screen (which would mean I would not need to use the floating bus technique), currently I'm a purist aiming at the 48K Spectrum but I will be doing a 128K version as well so I'll keep that knowledge in my back pocket.

I need to get back to this processing stuff now so that I can get it all moving...