Re: Prince of Persia for ProDOS? was Re: QIX for ProDOS

[Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co>]

On Wed, 31 Oct 2012, BLuRry wrote:

> Both hires pages are in use, but I think that PoP's buffers can be moved 
> around pretty easily.  Mechner didn't use any evil tricks that I could 
> find.  I didn't even see many hints of self-modifying code to be honest. 
> It should be possible to reassemble PoP in a way that relocates its 
> buffers to non-contiguous places, such as areas of the shape table that 
> are not needed at the time.  Or auxmem.
>
> To be honest, shoving lookup data into a slinky ram card is getting more 
> and more temping as I think about it.  ;-)

If available, I'd use a Slinky, GS RAM or RAMworks for anything possible, 
to save swapping.  Then in a pinch, the disk.

Since I don't care to support the buggy pre-enhanced //e, it is possible 
to go further and use 65C02 opcodes (except the Rockwell ones since stock 
chips Apple used didn't have them, nor the 65816).  I don't know how much 
that would help.  (PoP is supposed to work even on the original //e, so 
long as it could do DHGR for the attract screen.)

My BLOADer uses about 1.5K buffer but this might reduce down to 1K if done 
right?  I think PoP has to spool the whole track.  It might be possible to 
reduce the use of buffers to 1K+whatever ProDOS uses.

-uso.