Wednesday, December 05, 2007

SuperCPU: Damn that 1Mhz memory...

Okay.... It wasn't quite setup right. For those that haven't played with a SuperCPU, they have to do sime jiggery-pokery to write into the C64's RAM (So the VIC can see it), and I hadn't enabled that correctly. This means the block transfer of a bitmap takes AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!! :(

If I trigger it at the panel in XeO3 (21 lines down) it "just" finishes before the screen starts again (well, almost).

The screen "building" (aka the software character map) "IS" very very fast is is practicle... but the copy into 1Mhz memory is horrible.

However.... Because I can use FAST memory for building up the screen and drawing lots of sprites, it should still work. It just means that I need to set everything up and take the huge hit for the bitmap copy..

As a reminder what this gives is a virtually unlimited character supply (no longer 256), Fantastic colours via the bitmap colour ram+Normal character RAM, AND as many software sprites as I can render in the time! No more are sprites limited by the number of characters I want to lose in the 256 bank.

As I side note.... I "did" finally get MetalDust to see what games on the SuperCPU were like, and I wasn't THAT impressed. Music aside (which Im not a fan of), I think it just looks like a polised C64 game rather than something you KNOW is done on a SuperCPU. If you look at games like Driller when they are run through the SCPU, its OBVIOUS that you have an enhanced machine, its SOOOOOOO much better. Metal Dust is just "nice", except it takes AGES to load, and basically scrolls a bitmap....

Id rather have quick loading (so not too much data), and try and fill the screen with sprites (hard+soft) to make it LOOK like a SCPU game. I know colour clash would make it seem a little "non-C64-ish", but I think allowing you to fill the screen more would just be nicer.

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