XeO3: Sprites....damn them....

Well, Russell and I have discussed this cache problem at length, and came to the simple, resounding conclusion - I'm a moron. When I started doing the sprite routine some 6 years or more ago, I hadn't done any real 6502 in anger (as it were), for over 10 years before that! And when I designed it, I used normal structures of things. This is bad. In 6502 you really want to use the index registers and multiple arrays for structs. Like this.....

  struct
    dw  Next
    dw  Last
    db  index
    db  flags
    ds  8
    ds  72
  end

But instead, you should really do this....

NextIndex   ds  140
LastIndex   ds  140
index       ds  140
flags       ds  140
GfxLo       ds  140
GfxHi       ds  140

Now, you really have to wonder why I haven't clicked with this before since my scripting system does just that! Well, now that I know, I'll make it part of the rewrite of the sprite system, but this is a pretty large undertaking and will take time...... bugger.

Anyway, even after I do all this Im still not sure I'll be able to use the cache to its full. Even at 40-50 cycles, thats almost a full scanline, and with 10 sprites, thats a lot to waste every game cycle. With a simple circular list, you only lost around 20-30 every minute or so....

Doing this change will also allow me to remove the redundent 8 bytes in each sprite-cache block, which will help save space overall.