Tuesday 10 December 2013

4 on the floor.

Managed to find the bug in the rivet level. The dangers of local labels and unfinished code...


The game's data structures are starting to become a little clearer now. Aside from the expected jumble of timers, temporary and sundry variables there's a table of objects @$6400 to the end of memory. This table keeps track of objects like fireballs, springs, elevators, hammers, barrels, etc - basically anything that moves or can be interacted with. Everything's also nicely aligned; objects are either 16 or 32 bytes depending on how much data is required to store their state.

I've also found what appear to be two bugs in the level initialisation code!

In the 2nd (cement pie) level there's a call to the routine that initialises the spring sprites from the elevator level. The sprites themselves are located off-screen so there's no visible side-effects, but none-the-less there's no reason it should be called.

In the 3rd (elevator) level the code that initialises the elevators appears to have a bug. The code to initialise the 6 elevator objects instead uses two nested loops to overwrite a byte (with the same value) in the first 3 objects twice, instead of looping through all 6. It looks like the code used to use a different value for the 4th-6th objects and was quickly patched... either way there's still a bug as the start address is initialised inside the outer loop. I don't know (yet) what this byte represents, so I don't know the effects of the bug.

So now the real fun begins!

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