Monday 28 January 2013

Day 28 : ROM Completion Day

I have some time to work on this today. So my aim is to complete the ROM image so that the Blackjack game will actually run. I hope to release a working game at the end of today.

Update 1 : So far : fixed a bug in the assembler (duplicate labels.... must've been asleep) and completed the gameplay core. Apart from testing, I only need the code for the special bets (doubling and insurance) and bet selection / player selection / bankroll selection / game selection code, all of which is hardcoded at present.

Update 2 : All the special bets are now coded and tested briefly. Just the selectors to do now.  The ROM size is 1724 bytes, comfortably within the 2k limit. Might even have space for a title page.

Update 3 : Now code complete. Chased down a couple of bugs (not fun without a proper debugger for the RISC Machine), so not yet releasable, want to test it a bit more yet. But it is complete at 2,026 bytes, just enough to fit into a 2k ROM.

Mind you the debug time is my own fault. I was calculating the offset in ROM as $1000 whereas it was actually $1200 so all the tracking was 512 out. 

Actually I could trim quite a few bytes. There are quite a few examples of code that ends something like,

bl someroutine
ret

which I could just shortcut into 'b someroutine' but I just don't like that sort of coding.  There are quite a few subroutines which are really broken down for clarity, things like that. I'm not using the Executive sound routines at all.

However, I will uploaded the latest Executive (1.3) and Blackjack (0.91) sources if anyone wants to have a look.

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