I’ve been making slow but steady progress over the last few days, but I’ve really fallen down on the blogging part of this Retrochallenge. There are a few game development topics I’ve been meaning to talk about, so I’ll try to get a few short updates out over this next weekend.
Just for fun, here’s an error message that I’d been expecting to see for the last few days, and it finally happened after adding a couple lines of code to the main play loop:
It’s amazing how fast you can blow through 64 kilobytes of memory, even if you’re being careful. It all adds up: The custom character set with graphics is 2 KB; each 16×16 section of map requires an entire 256-byte page, and you need at least 4 in memory at any given time; the conversation scripts for even a handful of NPCs can take a huge amount of space. That’s not even counting the actual code!
I’m okay for now – there were a few unused pages in the chunk of RAM I set aside for data structures, and I was able to rearrange things to give me some breathing space. We’ll have to see how long that lasts!