I got the animation mod working (although it wasn't being used - I'd have to modify the AI for that.)

The new code was displaying the objects properly at any rate. But I noticed some Bad Behaviour shortly after as I mucked about. Screen jumping. At predictable points.

In short, it looks like the Vertical Blank is taxed beyond capacity under some conditions (holding an object while pushing against walls was a sure way to do it if there were a few other objects on the screen) etc. I did a quick test on the timer and noticed that the timer left on the vertical blank sits betwen 6 and 2. That's a wide gap I find. The screen doesn't jump in the debugger as I go frame by frame, but that's probably due to nothing being done with the controller to cause anything extra to be done.

So before I continue writing more for the game, I'm going to backtrack and do a SERIOUS optimization for speed. Find better ways to store/retrieve stuff in tables etc. Perhaps try to lighten up on ram compression a bit so that I don't have to extract/translate the bits of a byte before using it. (At times a big waste of time!) And I'll go through all the counters/loops and make sure that they're ALL down counters. I'm sure most of them are, but I can think of a couple that aren't.

When I look over the overall code I think I have most of the ram I want to use allocated. Meaning I can probably get away with a little more waste on ram if it'll make things faster.

So I guess rebuilding the rom will be the real goal for version 0.019. It'll just happen to have animation support when all is said and done!