oh, you need to have the ending ']' on the sprite data

@Quigibo: Mhmm I am confused by what you mean

I am unsure if I understand the concept. I was sure C*8+Pic0 worked as Picturetodisplay(0+C). For example, in Celtic, if you want to display an entire picture and have pics stored in 3 through 8, you'll do real(3,C,0,1. The C would be the pic that needs to be recalled. So basically 0+C. How does your concept works? I know about the *8 part, but I don,t understand otherwise...

@Eeems: no, because it worked fine in my older programs without it.

When you input pictures, strings, and other data, it get added to the end of the program.  Here is the memory map for you:

<Program><Data1><Data2><Data3>...<LastData>

The first data block you entered was "Pic8".  Don't forget, that's just an arbitrary name, you can call it Str8Z if you want and it will behave the same way.  What it does is add that data you just wrote to the end of the assembly program.  The pointer to that block of data is now in the name Pic8.  You will see if you do "Disp Pic8>Dec" that Pic8 is really just a pointer to the end of the program so far.

But then, the you added more data and stored the pointer to that data in Pic7.  Those new bytes get added to the end of the program directly after the first sprite since that is the new end of the program.  In fact, you don't even need to give it a name, you can leave the -> part out since you don't need to refer to it by a unique name.  You can get that pointer simply by doing 8+Str8 since it occurs 8 bytes after the first pointer.

I am going to call the first sprite Str8Z so it appears arbitrary:

:[FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF]→Str8Z
:[FEFEFEFEFEFEFE00]
:[FCFCFCFCFCFC0000]
:[F8F8F8F8F8000000]
:[F0F0F0F000000000]
:[E0E0E00000000000]

At this point, the first picture is Str8Z.  You can call Pt-On(X,Y,Str8Z)
The next sprite is 8 bytes after the first one right?  So you can do Pt-On(X,Y,8+Str8Z)
The next is 8 bytes after that so you can do Pt-On(X,Y,16+Str8Z)
Then Pt-On(X,Y,24+Str8Z)

In general, the nth sprite (starting at n=0) in that particular data block is N*8+Str8Z.
So in general, you can do Pt-On(X,Y,N*8+Str8Z) to get the nth sprite.

EDIT: and by the way, Builderboy's method is identical.

What is a sprite?  Its just a pointer.  As is a string, even the variables themselves are pointers!  But you don't have direct access to those which is why L1 says "saveSScreen+54" because each 2 byte number is stored there (26*2 = 52) plus a 2 byte random seed = 54 bytes.

So actually, this is kinda cool.  Another way you can access variables:
:5->A
is the same as:
:5->{L1-54}
:0->{L1-53}    ;This is because the number is 2 bytes and also little endian
But the first one is more optimized of course.

aaah ok I see. It might be hard for me to understand all of these, but I am starting to get it now. Thanks a lot for your help.


Btw my program now works. I am not sure if it's faster or slower. If it's slower, the slow down is sure hard to notice, though. However, 811 bytes is much better than the 1546 bytes my other compiled program took. Still a bit large compared to the source (653 bytes for old program and 313 for new one) but a big improvement.

Nice DJ. An improvement is an improvement, no matter how small or big.

Pointers are really neat!  Thanks for implementing them, and I finally understand why you'd want to use [Data not stored to anything].  You can access it easily with pointers!

Cool!

Nice to know.

However, do you imply that two divisions in a row by 2 instead of a single one will be smaller or am I interpreting this exception wrong?

A/8 is slower than A/2/2/2.