Introductions are in order

Despite the lack of updates on this blog, I've been plugging away at Neo Kong at every opportunity.
 
I jumped the gun a bit on the game-play; I thought I'd fast-track the game initialisation and get into the actual game, but it turns out that there's too much logic dependent on the initialisation. So I stepped back and ported all the initialisation routines properly. And then I realised that I had forgotten altogether about the introduction screens...

Coin-up and watch the intro screens

So now you can coin up, start a game, watch the intro, and when the game is over (I set Mario to die immediately) it returns to the attract mode loop. All that is missing outside the game-play now is the high score registration routine - which I'll probably finish off next just to get it out of the way. Once that's complete, it should mean that the only code remaining is in-game game-play code.

I do have one intermittent bug; occasionally the Neo Geo will reset when you start a game. I suspect it's an issue with a register having non-zero high-order bits due to BIOS routines where I have forgotten to zero them first - I've already made that mistake a few times. I'll track it down at some point when it starts to get too annoying.

Although I do 99% of my testing under MAME running un-throttled, I have noticed that the game runs too slow when it is throttled. I guess that's not too surprising, given that I'm rendering the entire tilemap, plus 64 sprites, plus calling the BIOS handler every VBLANK. At some point I'll do some further analysis but right now I suspect every 2nd VBLANK is being missed and it's running at half-speed. Not an issue atm since there's plenty of display optimisation to be done.

I've also been thinking ahead about what bells 'n' whistles might be nice. I'll add a (soft) dipswitch setting to select either US/Japanese level sequence. I guess I should also look at supporting loading and saving of high scores.