I disabled some w.i.p. features because they are game-breaking. When you press F1 the soundeffects are enabled. These soundeffects come straight from the I/O port.
New in this version: Animated tiles Blade: charge up your peashooter and release the charge to cut trough dirt blocks. Generator mini boss (work in progress) TIMID compatible music engine (but no music yet) Stuff.
An rpg could have music in fights, because only animations and would interrupt the sounds, but given Hero Core is an action exploration game it's not really an option.
Edit: I managed to increase the speed of the transfer protocol There is barely any lag even when there is a register write every interrupt. Writing 10kB takes 9 seconds, so that is a little over 1kB/sec (which is quite good considering the original protocol was 2kB/sec without any cpu load from the SID emulation on the arduino!) The bottleneck is still the arduino. I can only send in bits as fast as it can process them.
My music engine on the TI84+ end is very lightweight and I tested it with the worst case scenario: A register write every interrupt on speed 6 (speed 2,0 made the framerate plummet). I barely have a fps drop.
The game runs at around 25fps with music and 27 without. I think most people won't mind the 3fps drop if they can have music.
Summary: 25fps with music engine on 1KB/s link protocol
Oh that's called metroid 2? I saw it back when I joined omnimaga and I did not know the name until now.
About the sound and the music: If you do not have a soundchip you can still have soundeffects, but I have not found a way to play music alongside gameplay. I have made TRAXE chiptune software and that uses the standard Freq() command to play notes. This engine is not suited for games of course. The sample that I made in fl-studio is about what you can expect from the soundchip music. The linkport version will never come anywere close to it, so I don't think it's worth the framerate drop it would cause.
I still need to get some work done on the music engine and perhaps write a music tracker, but that's gonna take a while. Does anyone have music software written in axe that I can alter so it works with my soundchip?
I want to be able to make this song (file attached). It's the boss theme and what it would sound like on a SID chip (made in fl-studio to see if I could make it with only 3 channels).
In metroid 2 there is just one real boss: the queen. All the evolved metroids share the same AI with perhaps a few different attacks added. They re-used them over and over. I do not want that for herocore. The essence of herocore is fighting different original bosses until you get enough items to be able to fight the final boss. You could just go straight to the last boss if you wanted to, but you won't have all the upgrades and you will most likely die instantly.
There are some bosses that share the same AI though:
I will not be using any new enemies. Hero core has enough original enemies in it. Most of them share one of 3 AI patterns, so it's easier for me to implement those. I think i'm going to make my own graphics for the detailed walls.
The eZ80 can run at 50Mhz and the pipeline technology makes it more efficient. There are versions with 16k of built in SRAM and 256k of flash. It has all sorts of interfaces including SPI and I2C which makes it easier to interface with serial LCD's, SD cards etc.
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There is barely any lag even when there is a register write every interrupt. Writing 10kB takes 9 seconds, so that is a little over 1kB/sec (which is quite good considering the original protocol was 2kB/sec without any cpu load from the SID emulation on the arduino!) 
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