I don't really understand the main advantages to use vertically aligned data. What could it improve?

How frequently would the switch between buffer styles be made? If it's once every few minutes or so, we have room in the archive.

But.. why would you need different buffers? You can use the same 768 bytes for both. When running the battle engine you won't be running the tilemap engine, you can use the same space for both.

I don't see a huge issue with dropping support for 83+BE models. It allows us to increase the speed by 2.5x, and have significantly more space to work with, and it's a fairly small subset of the community.

Matrefeytontias, there is plenty of room for an extra 1800 bytes of graphical routines, especially if it makes it significantly faster.

This isn't a case of "Not Trying to Optimize". This is a case of "Trying to optimize a certain way, that removes 83+BE support."

@willrandship putting Return!If Full at the beginning of a program is not called optimizing. It's called being lazy.

@StreetWalker thanks ^^ and for tilemaps, remember that there will also be regular sprites and other things ; but you'll have to ask Xeda for that rather than me.

Also, I got a skeleton of battle engine done. For now, it's able to :

• Display the battle scene on a 4*4 isometric 3D grid (no textures yet, 16*16 blocks)
• Place correctly the party members and enemies on the corresponding blocks of the map, depending on the number of characters involved in the battle
• Display participants using dynamic sprites
• Display with text the name of items and the amount of money that the player obtained by beating all opponents (pressing [clear] is the only way to beat all opponents atm )

The whole engine is packed into a single function that takes 3 arguments. For example, here's the command I use atm :

BeginBattle(Data(4,0,1,2,3),Data(2,3,2),Data(3,0,2,1,1000^r))

What does it do : it tells the engine to start a battle which will involve 4 party members (0 to 3), 2 enemies (3 and 2) and that winning the battle will give the player 3 items (1, 3 and 2) and 1000 dollars/coins/insert_some_name_for_money_here.

I'll post a screenshot ASAP so you'll see it in action

Even if we can't keep it at 6MHz, we will end up with a pretty fast program running at 15 MHz
So, it's a nice goal either way

Wow Matrefeytontias, that looks like it will be pretty cool! I can't wait to see some battle animations! o.o I already have ideas of what it will look like.