Articles by Retro Ports

The shields are now rendered in the correct location on the screen. As planned, the code now buffers the complete 512-byte area of the screen containing the shields. So whilst the rendering into the buffer is now more complicated, the save/restore is a simple block copy. This is in contrast …

Not much time to work on it as I have a sneaking suspicion that getting Space Inavders working on the CoCo3 is pretty low on my employer’s priority list.Fixed the player explosion, UFO explosion and the UFO score when hit.A number of ‘magic numbers’ in the disassembly have been fixed, …

Two very brief sessions over the last few days.Player lasers and alien explosions are all-but-fixed now. I’ve realised that I need to go back and review all the reference points used for the rotation again. But it’s something I’ll leave until all the rendering routines at least look correct, even …

In search of low-hanging fruit I decided to fix the logic for detecting the edges of the screen so that the invaders reverse direction at the right point.I decided the quickest and most reliable process was trial-and-error. I ultimately ended up with the right magic numbers in the code; whether …

I think I’ve just doubled the number of posts from last year in just 2 days this year!?!At lunchtime today I continued where I left off last night. A few red herrings along the way but I’ve managed to identify a couple of issues that explain the crashes, and even …