C64 :: Hmm, upgrades

Today (well okay, yesterday to be strictly accurate) saw me taking out a lump of the nasty movement handling code and rewriting it to double the horizontal resolution; usually i just deal with values of $00 to $ff for horizontal sprite positions and multiply everything by two to save having to piddle around with the most significant bit, but this new game was getting to the point where it needed at least some objects to be able to track along with the landscape so a bit of surgery was required... eventually the damned thing worked as well, at least it did after a lot of fairly creative swearing and a second re-write to get the overheads down. Now the only serious bit of CPU grind from the object handling is when it nips off to pull up a new baddie. i'm not sure at the moment why it's got such a large CPU requirement but i can hazard a few guesses; it copies 32 bytes per nasty then re-assigns some of those around to other places... so it might be time to see if i can't consolidate those data tables into one affordable loan place in memory.

The other news is that i'm finally starting to settle on a name; this process usually takes a while, bouncing words around and seeing which sound best when put together. After a little mental juggling, the most probable candidate for this game is Charge Armada.