I've been sitting here playing with a C64 multiplexor - boy has it been a long time since I did this! Actually, reading about Dan's one from Armalyte is what got me doing the port in the fist place. Armalyte was probably the best looking game to come out on the C64, so I had a read through his source and got back in the mood. Pretty interesting it was too, I'd never really used the stack much since I tended to stick to zero page lda/sta as it was one cycle quicker, but his multiplexor sort approach was novel. So, I did some tests on it and compared it to the one I had in Blood Money... His varaied quite a lot and either gained a few scanlines or lost a few depending on sprite order etc. Mine is pretty much static (unless theres < MAXSPRITES on screen, in which case it gains) so I've decided to stick with mine for now, particually since it does a proper sort, while Dan's is an approximation (which is usually good enough for a multiplexor).
So now that its all sorted, I'm just about to start on the actual fun stuff! Building new raster interrupts based on where a sprite needs to go. When I first used this in Blood Money (after hacking Armalyte to find out how he did it), I thought it was very cool indeed. In fact, it took me a while to actually believe thats what he was doing - very cool stuff. In Ballistix, I'd gone with a static array as documented by Braybrook in Morpheus, and since I HAD to control 32 sprites for that, it was probably a fairly wise course of action. But for Blood Money, I could use something more flexible, and after seeing Armalyte, I just had to know how he did it.
Anyway, I'm about to do it again. I'm not quite sure if I'll follow his IRQ routine either, as I hate maintaining large unrolled loops. Im sure at some point in the future I can unroll it if I need to.
OH! And I've just discovered a 4th C64 that I have, and its the older ones with the original SID chip in it, so I can at last listen to all the old classics on the machine itself! Ahh...bliss.
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