I decided the final Status Bar scanline size will be 20. The top 16 basically handle the useful info, but I'm keeping a few lines reserved for repositioning the sprites used in the status bar to be used in the gamescreen itself. Obviously that's going to be needed.

As such, the final version 0.008 looks slightly different from beta 2. I'd love to finish the status bar completely but until I master a hmove 73 routine it just isn't going to be. I have a potential alternative to it if it becomes necessary, but for now I'm keeping my hopes up!

For version 0.009, I'm returning to the display kernel and rewriting it into a Basic Room routine. I'll be writing multiple kernels for displaying rooms in this game eventually as I think I've mentioned before. This room is as it says, Basic. It'll be one of the simpliest room types! (Although I'm sure I could (and may) write a simplier one.)

Up until now, the display code for the playfield was intended mainly as a testbed. The room was completely hardwired in. My intention, despite common sense, is to load the room details into ram. This takes up a lot of ram, yes. About 40-50 bytes of it actually. Still, it'll add some flexibility to other things I have in mind, and if I run out of ram I'll do the alteration to assume the cartridge has a Superchip. If I do that I might end up letting the superchip hold all the room details plus various game variables. (An idea I've had since the beginning anyway)

In version 0.009, the room loading will be hardwired in still, but it will be loaded properly into ram instead of pointing to hardwired rom-tables etc. It'll also show a new way of handling the background color. (Assuming what I have already written actually works. )