Paradroid!!!!

At long (long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, LONG!) last... TNT has started a proper blog of his Paradriod update. Its basically a disassembled, updated (a lot) and then reassembled version of the original game. He's making heaps of improvements and its well worth a shot if you haven't already. You can find his blog HERE

I've decided to start the work of upgrading my assembler to be 65816 compatible (which is used in the SuperCPU) as I fancy having a little play with 20Mhz of power! I know - Im jumping around quite a bit, but that happens as I try and keep my interest going. I'll probably play with this at lunchtimes at work, so I hope it won't get in the way too much. The 65816 is very neat and I've used it a lot in the past when doing SNES work (Lemmings2), its got full 16 bit registers although you can swap them back and forth. Its also got access to a full 16Mb of RAM (which my Super CPU has!) which could make for some REALLY cool stuff - lots of space for buffers and tables here! Also Zero page becomes DirectPage and it can move!! In Lemmings2 I pointed zero page at my graphics so that the code ran faster! I'll need to look out my SNES assembler manual to see the syntax I used in that, but all in all - it should be pretty good fun!

Edit: So I've just added my first new 65816 instructions! yeeeeeeaaa!!

     inc a
     opcode [$00]
     opcode [$00],y

I'm so happy... :) This does 24bit indirect addressing through the direct page register (the new movable ZeroPage)

You know something....the THOUGHT of filling even 4Mb with C64 graphics/sound is frightning.... On the SNES I had a ROM disk system, and most of the memory was taken up with that, but here... its RAM...so you cna actually DO stuff with it - outstanding! I may have to update my C64 emulator to allow 65816 code as well...Mmmm... even simple stuff without the need to fallback to 1Mhz for custom chips would probably do - I dont think anyones done a SuperCPU emulator before....

The other thing I didn't realise is that the 65816 is also 65c02 compatable...which means I can probably add 65c02 to the assembler as well...