This is me tuning the bad lines. See the missing pixel in the forest? Center of screen, where PF2 is about to reflect itself. naughty, naughty pixel.

 

The pink "spots" are a decoration. Decorations on the map exist at 12x8 px per tile, i.e. they're drawn using P1 at double-clocks and 2 line resolution. (Tiles themselves are 4x8 pixels, using 4-clock-wide playfield pixels times 3 lines resolution.) Later on they turned into a cheesie picture of an house. Then, something disrupted .y during my main loop and blew everything to Hell.

 

The player actually is drawing, here. His feet are messed up by a bad line though.

 

That was a really really dumb rendition of a tile floor or something.

 

Oh... see? colours (per row) are back in.

 

Now I use the stack, too. At last check I had 15 bytes of free memory, but I know some of that is wasted. (That includes "padding" for all the players "stats," btw.) I'm leaving a few things split off into different ZP locations that aren't used at the same time just to make debugging easier.

 

Tonight's goal: fix up the timing with the colour and decoration code back in. If that's completed before midnight, maybe try to marry the bank switching code back in and see if the combat, conversation, and Ursa interpreters can co-exist. Or maybe un-comment all the joystick code.

 

Hint to future players: scripts on the map are triggered by P0/P1 collisions. So, to enter a village, walk into its icon, to talk to a person, smack into them. No surprises there, I'm sure.

 

Hint #2: controls breakdown:

 

Joystick: walk around, scroll text, select from menus.

Trigger: select from menus mostly. On the map: enters the "combat screen" with no enemies so you can equip items/spells.

Reset: "Save game?" prompt. Will give you a nasty code to re-enter or look for an AtariVox/MemCard to write to.

Select: Stats screen.

Difficulty: sets handicaps for attack/defend in combat.

Color/B&W: does what it says it does.

Power: does what it says it does

 

So, it's mostly intuitive but there is a painful mental leap to think, "if I pull the Reset switch it won't kill my (hours?) of progress, but instead will let me save it!"

 

I'll probably put a link to "save" on the stats screen too. That will hurt my soul less.