A better chessboard
Sometimes designing kernels is more fun than actual game programming. Anyway, the idea of doing a better chess kernel has been on my mind for a while. I've been skeptical of the notion that chess could only be done with Venetian blinds or flickering, and this weekend I came up with a design that needs neither. Like my other board game kernels it relies heavily on PF graphics and multiple color changes.Unfortunately I could not figure out a way to use self-modifying code. The PF must be updated every line, and there was not enough time in a loop to retrieve new playfield data. The extra cycle needed for indexed addressing was just too much. What I did for this proof of concept instead was to repeat code. There are 12 groups of nearly identical code for each scanline. The only difference is the addresses from where the PF data is loaded.I can make the colors of the first two pieces variable, so I would need 64 routines to cover every combination. The grand total is about 27K. This chess kernel is theoretically possible, but I'd rather find a way to reduce the size.As usual, a screenshot of a single row and a mockup of the full board is attached.
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