Not much progress on the bug from before. I think it's due to an unimplemented Yaroze library function. RobotRon uses the 3D matrix functions and I hadn't bothered to implement them yet. As such it was returning garbage, which I think was causing the random hang. I haven't exactly pinpointed what goes wrong, but getting those functions working should fix it.

I haven't done much lately because I have decided to sell my old Magic the Gathering cards to fund other enterprises. I have six large binders full of cards - one for each of the colors plus another for artifacts & lands. I also have a ton of loose cards. I went through the loose cards and sorted them by expansion. That's what you see here.

Each stack is a separate expansion set. Top left are my betas (very well played so not worth much). Next to them are the Unlimiteds and then the big stack of Reviseds. Other big stacks are for Fallen Empires, Ice Age, Homelands, and Urza's Saga.

And that doesn't even include the ones in the binders! I'm hoping to get about $500 from all this. The big ticket items are my dual lands, of which I have eighteen. They're worth $15-30 a pop.

I'll sell the expensive ones on eBay. Then I'll put the rest up on Card Shark. It's a great site that lets you buy and sell individual cards from other collectors. In fact I just purchased a bunch of cards from there to fill out the rest of my Unglued set. I figure I'll get more for it if it's complete - I was only a few short. Other expansions I'm missing quite a few so they probably aren't worth completing.

As I sorted through the big stack of Urza's Saga I made note of the cards that were worth the most according to Card Shark. Of course, I don't have any of them. Typical.

Game Progress I'm trying to track down a pretty crafty bug at the moment. It deals with my new background star renderer. The code works fine during the "Get Ready" screen, but as soon as it kicks into the game proper it crashes.

Dumping registers makes me think a DMA is going wrong somewhere. I figured out the reason why the main game crashes is that it draws gradiated lines, whereas the Get Ready screen does not.

So there's some interaction going on and a bug somewhere, but darned if I can find it.

Game Progress I'm working on optimizing the "Get Ready" screen before each level. To get it running full speed I have written two new renderers for the sprite lib. One is a clear renderer that erases the screen and then adds stars. This will be used for the background and remove the need to draw 90 separate single-pixel sprites for the stars. The other is a dedicated box renderer so that boxes no longer need to be drawn using sprites.

I got the clear renderer mostly working and it shaved off almost 30ms per frame (used to be 75ms, now is around 45ms). The cool thing is I can go back and add this renderer to Decaying Orbit so that it no longer has static backgrounds. Huzzah!

The box renderer isn't debugged yet, but should provide a similar speed boost I would think.

Most recently, however, I dived back into the sprite library source. I want a couple small features and have hit the code size limit. The assembly has to fit in 4kB because that is the amount of iram on each MPE. I was pretty much hitting the limit, but now after some investigations I have reduced it somewhat. I shaved off about 100 bytes. This may not seem like much, but it provides more than enough room to do what I want.

One of my goals with the code reduction is to add performance monitoring as a permanent feature. In the past I could optionally include it using ifdefs. However, due to the code size hitting the limit I was no longer able to include it. Now that I've reclaimed some space I want to put it back permanently so that I can use it to tune the sprite library.

Game Progress I have the title screen for Robot Ron running at full speed now. Well, technically the render time per frame oscillates above and below 20 ms so I may do a spot more of optimization to get it at a consistent 50 fps.

The next part is the "Get Ready" screen before each level. It is dog slow due two main things. First, the star background is drawn as single-pixel lines. Thankfully I added point plotting for Decaying Orbit and can easily reuse that here. The more difficult issues are the large rectangles. I pointed them out at about 1:56 of the Robot Ron video blog post. Writing a special case renderer that handles boxes will speed things up a bunch.

Is anyone interested in playing around with this? I could post a version that you can burn to a CD and try yourself.

Edit: I also added a link to the authentication tools to the left nav bar.