It's been a while that I posted here. Been busy converting #Larry to #EasyFlash #C64 cartridge format. That took a whole lot of time and effort to learn new tricks, but I finally have the hang of it. Here's an experimental bit of the intro sequence I'm making for the game now that I have a full megabyte of ROM to work with. The speed difference really is astounding compared to even the fastest disk loader. I'm still going with disk for savegames, though. EasyFlash emulation isn't perfect on all platforms so I'll treat the cart as 100% ROM only. I wrote a few CLI tools to help me prep .CRT builds. Cartman for CRT building: https://code.area536.com/Public/cartman and Kla2kick for bitmap to ASM processing: https://code.area536.com/Public/kla2kick Both are very rough around the edges but they work. They're BSD-licensed so have at them if you like!

Small details bring life to a scene. I don't have the luxury of full EGA software sprites, but still.. I like my version of the broken hotel sign better. Now let's see if we can get some dialogue going in there. #C64 #gamedev #retrogaming

This looks minor, but it's actually a pretty big step. The scene itself has its own logic separate from the main game. This means there's a place to do small trickery like this to improve the visuals and Larry can play hide 'n seek outside Lefty's. #C64 #gamedev #retrogaming

This game being my first ever try at 6502 Assembly and it having been 32 years since I wrote any C64 BASIC, Larry smoothly walking all the way across the screen is somewhat of a small personal victory. Sorry for the boring video but #C64 coders may sympathize. ;-)

Walking around animation is now complete. There's still some fine tuning to do on the actual controls (keyboard only for now). Sprite masking and bounding also need work, but it's almost time for the story.

The animation routines work. Larry can walk back and forth now. Next up: pixeling in the remaining frames for walking left and right and write a bit of code for them to work as well. #C64 #gamedev #LeisureSuitLarry

Larry moves! Thought I'd show current progress. Animation isn't there yet but the sprites move without glitching and Larry doesn't get cut in half either (he consists of 2 sprites). Now working on proper controls, animation, and Larry's ability to go more than 255 pixels to the right. This isn't going half bad, considering that this game project is the second time ever that I even tried ASM programming.

Another tiny bit of progress: the player sprite is back on the streets. Difference with last time's "moonwalker" video is that there's much more functional scaffolding in there so controls and dialog entry are really close to working. #C64 #gamedev #leisuresuitlarry

Woohoo! I *FINALLY* got my dialogue routine to display text after a command, then return to command entry mode without destroying the background graphics and not being dog-slow! Yes it's still a bit glitchy around the IRQ's, but premature optimizations are the bane of a dev's existence. This may not seem like a lot, but this rabbit hole has been driving me crazy for days. #C64 #gamedev #retrogaming #LeisureSuitLarry

My game-in-progress loads correctly 9 out of 10 times. The one time it doesn't, it looks like this text mode screen and hangs. Looks like the IRQ routines fail but only occasionally. The red border comes from the IRQ handler set at the top of the screen. Running it again shows the other screen and accepts text input. It has the red border but only to the point where it's expected. How do I even debug something intermittent like this? #Commodore64 #gamedev #retrogaming