Ooh I see in your signature. Sounds interesting. I hope you can manage to finish it. I made a Metroid game before that is called Metroid II: Evolution/Metroid II: The Last Chozo Expansion Set, but it used xLIB so it was pretty slow on a regular 83+ and controls were wonky (although when using Doors CS7 or Celtic III it was slightly faster). When you have some progress done, are you planning to post updates in a new topic about it?

Yeah with BASIC it's hard to keep things fast. Also data is pretty large. If bosses aren't hard-coded, I am sure it could remain pretty small. I think Metroid II was about 15 KB if we exclude map data and xLIB APP.

Yeah that too. But by large data I meant for example if you use matrices or lists, each tile takes 9 bytes when stored in matrix files and in the program they take 2-3 bytes. With 300 12x8 maps that grows pretty fast compared to Axe's 1 bytes per tile (or 0.5 if you use 16 tiles per map). You can use strings, but if you use 2 byte tokens like lowercase letters in your maps, those takes more space in the string, plus pasting large strings containing 2 byte tokens with 2nd+RCL can cause RAM clear in the PRGM menu if you're low on memory due to an OS glitch. There are also pics, but then you're limited to 2 tiles, unless you use some form of dynamic tilemapping pixel-testing every side of the tile, which is slow.

What do you mean by 'redrawing tiles each step'?

as far as I know, vertical/horizontal method of tilemapping is the best one since then you can get away with only drawing the tiles at the edge every frame rather then having to redraw the whole screen.

You can draw directly to the screen in Axe.

I actually managed to get a tilemapper working at 22 FPS with total redraw, and while thats 3 times slower than Raylins its pretty darn good for complete redraw ^^ But its a bit weird right now because it is jerky because of the different speeds.  I'll see if i can smooth it out.

I think he was planning to rewrite a new guide at one point that was up to date and more complete, but I don't know what happened to it.