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I have made a little more progress on my Star Castle demo. You can now move the ship around the screen and fire bullets, although there is no collision detection yet. The controls are: Joystick Left/Right - Rotate Joystick Up - Thrust Fire - Fire Bullets I have been trying to match the ship movement with the arcade version (by comparing with the MAME version). I think it is now reasonably close, but let me know if you think it needs improvement? The ship sprite is temporary (apologies to Thomas for copying the Thrust+ sprite) and will be replaced in the near future. There are also a few wrinkles, such as firing not working at the edges of the screen, and the bullets being fired from the centre of the ship. These issues should be easy to fix. The next step is to get the mines following the ship (the green blob at the bottom is what the mines will look like). Then the collision detection, which I'm not looking forward to! The source code is included below, but it is a big unoptimised mess at the moment. As always, let me know what you think. Unfortunately further progress will be slow now that the holidays have come to an end. Chris starkernel3.bin starkernel3.zip

Stages of programming: 1- Come up with an idea for a game. 2- come up with details and features for the game. 3- Try to program, realize some features just won't work on the 2600. 4- devise workarounds, or delete features. 5- run out of ROM, cut back more features. 6- learn bankswitching, put features back in. 7- run out of RAM, scratch head a lot. 8- search forums for help ideas. 9- set game code aside for awhile. 10- come back and look at code. 11- start code from scratch because you can't figure out what you were trying to do because you didn't add comments. 12- scratch head again 13- curse at the compiler 14- reread code and find the one non-indented thingie or miscapitalized whatnot 15- play pacman 16- lock yourself in a room with a ton of notes and don't come out until it works. I am finding programming to be like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle in your head without physically moving the pieces around- by the time I get some bits to fit together, I forgot about the first bits- it's just too much to remember at one time. Working a few minutes here and there doesn't help much. If I manage to get to a playable stage, there will be some sort of announcement in the forums somewhere.