[Coco] IRQ question

[Glen Hewlett]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the encouragement…. I’ll keep trudging through the code and hope one day with the help of the CoCo community I can get it running full speed.

Cheers,
Glen
> On Feb 2, 2017, at 10:22 PM, Mark McDougall <msmcdoug at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> 
> On 3/02/2017 7:29 AM, Simon Jonassen wrote:
> 
>> I beg to differ...
>> 
>> you can definately OPTIMIZE it to make it run in realtime.... !
> 
> I'll second Simon on this one.
> 
> If Sockmaster can get Donkey Kong running at full speed, then I believe Pacman can be made to run full speed as well. I'd even venture to say that Pacman's graphics hardware is less demanding than DK; certainly there's (a lot) less sprites than DK is capable of. For instance, DK employs a while extra MCU to move/update sprites!
> 
> Having said that, it may very well be the case that it is beyond any sort of auto-translation, and may instead require a lot of hand optimisation, so much so that renders the auto-translator superfluous? Pure speculation on my part.
> 
> As for the immediate concern, sprites... plenty of optimisations not just strictly to the code, but the overall operation. Simon is probably the best one to talk you through code optimisation on the 6809, if not sprites in general. You may need to consider things like pre-shifted and/or pre-flipped sprite data, dirty rectangles, etc etc above and beyond pure instruction optimisation.
> 
> IMHO it's going to be a lot more work than getting a half-decent auto-translator coupled with generic sprite emulation. But then, that's what makes it worth doing; you learn a lot more and it's a greater achievement at the end!
> 
> And FTR, Knight Lore runs on a 3.528MHz Z80 (albeit no sprites to emulate) and it runs *faster* on the Coco3 than the original! So hang in there!!!! :)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -- 
> Mark McDougall
> <http://retroports.blogspot.com.au>
> 
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