Hehe, the pressure is on

I was looking at Slova by HotDog and that is basically what I have in mind, except grayscale o.o We need to get chickendude in on this; ze is an excellent assembly programmer o.o

I am about to send a PM to chickendude detailing my coding plan. Basically, I think I can optimise it quite a bit (maybe 200 to 100 times per second it can be rendered) by keeping a mask that I rotate with the map. Then, for left/right rotating, I just shift the screen left/right, apply the mask to the tiles with AND logic and if Z is returned, draw a pixel off, if NZ is returned, draw the pixel on. Since I am planning on 3-level gray, I will need to do this on two buffers, but even then I think it will be pretty fast. As well, since it is 3-level gray that I am planning on, I will need to rotate the grayscale mask as well. Since it is 3-level gray, that will be very easy.

By my calculations, before I do any coding, shifting the screen one pixel takes about 22000 cycles, if I remember correctly, then to test each of the sprites and draw accordingly (with optimised assembly), that will take at most 3000 cycles. On two buffers, this will be about 50000 cycles total. At 6MHz, that is 120 times it can be drawn per second (not updating the LCD). At 15MHz, that is 300 times per second. that should make the grayscale still smooth Also, shifting up and down will be much, much faster. Probably one or two thousand cycles for both buffers which is 25 to 50 times faster

I hope my calculations are correct

hehe, yeah, I sure hope so. And it seems that squidgetx has corroborated my guestimate of 22000 cycles for shifting the screen.

A.K.A, no grayscale. I don't care for grayscale actually, and the games I made lately (not published since bullshit and just like only 2 in the latest 6 months) don't use grayscale. (they don't look nice either but that's another story. And no, I can't put them up here since 1. I deleted them and 2. My USB port is fried)

It's just a bit of a conundrum...the real challenge that Axe gray provides is that you have to do twice the screen work twice as fast. Think about the difference in how much code you can put into a 30fps monochrome game vs a 50fps grayscale one. That's why most asm games that use grayscale use crystal timer interrupts

The Desolate rewrite is 8lvl grayscale and runs at the same speed as 4lvl lol, but the data requirements for that would be outside the scope of this project. I think you guys need to lock down what kind of game this will be before deciding, like turn based or action game etc.