Blaster sprites, Advanced

Pew-pew-pew-pew-Blast!

Update on emulator issue, Oct 31st, 2018

Atari legend Nicolas Pomarède points out that it doesn’t really make sense to combine the NFSR and FXSR bits the way I do. And he’s right!

My mistake was relying on emulators while writing this, and using the NFSR and FXSR bits this way was the only way I could make it work. So…

Wanted!

Someone to figure out what is going wrong here. Please email me your findings at per@brainfish.net - thanks in advance!

v 1.04, Oct 23rd, 2018 - There was bug in X clipping when showing fewer than the 16 rightmost pixels. It displayed fine in STEem, which is why I missed it.

»

GCC, C loops and dbra...

For those of you working on GCC projects with an eye on code generation, you’ve probably wondered why GCC doesn’t always emit DBRA instructions for C loops. In fact, it rarely emits them - the stars need to be aligned just right. And sometimes you’ll be faced with something so ugly and inexplicable for a loop that it might put you off using the compiler at all… First thing to realise here is that its not always ‘crap compiler’ but often ‘garbage in, garbage out’. »

dml