Progress report reposted from revsoft:

I spent about 5 or 6 hours (maybe more, I wasn't keeping strict track of time, but I worked at least 5 hours total in two long sessions today) first rewriting a pretty important section of code for speed reasons, then tracking down and fixing the stuff I had broken in the process. I have successfully sped the game up a little more. I'm having slight issues still with a couple of things speed wise, nothing that is strictly problematic, but it bugs the crap out of me because I want this thing to be smooth as butter.

Speaking of how crazy this thing makes me sometimes, I am now triple backing up my progress, and I'm considering backing it up in a few more places! lol I'd be pretty upset if I ever lost anything in this process. With nearly 4 years of development and god knows how many hours of work I've put into it, I'd just about lose my mind if I lost this project. Actually... I decided to back it up to my ftp hosting on TIFreakware while I'm at it. :p

Lol the complexity is kind of getting away from me, I'm having to search through my code before writing new code so I don't reinvent the wheel. Them's the brakes with a project like this. I can't imagine what it would be like to program it in assembly. My brains would probably melt out of my ears.

Anyways, DOA's coming along nicely. I'll try and post recent screenshots as soon as I get some working screenshot software! lol I'm having issues with that and Windows 7. (dang non-backwards-compatibility horse-crap. Win 7 has irritated me mucho less than vista ever did (what a joke there, btw nested parentheses ftw) but it's still quite the irritant for sure.)

@Aaron you may need to ask in the help section and give info on what version and which screenshot making software you are using and which emu/version. Hopefully someone can help there.

Also keep up the good work

@flyingfisch blame TI's monopoly on schools. Teachers are sold out to Texas Instruments so students are almost forced to get a TI calc instead of a Casio. Also they aren't as documented as z80 and 68K calcs yet due to the much smaller community. Actually the TI-89 is facing the same problem now: Almost nobody program for them anymore, since TI is slowly phasing them out in favor of the TI-Nspire series. AaroneusTheGreat is probably one of, if not the only 68K ASM/C programmer remaining in the TI community right now.

ahh.

LOL, im probably the only active american programmer for Casio FX-9860! Just realized that.

Awesome! Wow, you're really hitting this thing hard now huh? =)

this game has more style than wolfenstein ever did =D
i always loved this project and am glad to see you're working on it again =)

Art_Of_Camelot: that's very odd. It could have just been too old to support it honestly. I think I was using code that was HW2 and up. I seem to remember something about that. And if/when you do try out Doom89, let me know what you think! I'm always open to feedback even though that project's been completed for years now lol.

Shmibs: That's a very kind thing of you to say! I've always envied the ID software team, they made so many popular and groundbreaking games. I even got in contact with them about the content of Doom89 before starting work to make sure I wasn't breaking any laws that I could get punished for. They told me that they couldn't give me permission to use the imagery and such, but they wouldn't do anything to me for doing so. That's the major reason Doom89 went anywhere past the fooling around stages. It kind of became a go ahead of sorts anyways. I thought some of them might actually check it out if I did well enough with it too, which would be a real honor. So far I haven't heard anything from them since then though. lol

I hope DOA doesn't let you down! Expectations seem to be very high these days!

Thanks for the encouragement. And I hope you like Doom89.

PROGRESS UPDATE:

I just finished fixing the proximity mines system. I broke it when I rewrote the animation code. The good news is because I decided to go with a complete rewrite of the system, I managed to save quite a few cycles and bytes. I don't know exactly how many I saved, but more good news on top of this, with the new code I wrote for the proximity mines, I'll be able to more quickly rewrite the code for the energy cannon, which incidentally also was broken when I started this major rewrite.

All of this rewriting has a major purpose, that being saving cycles and bytes, but also, i was beginning to get very close to the 65k executable limit. I had to do something. I could no longer let some things get handled in a clean, but not as efficient manner, I'm just running too much now. Fortunately, I planned very well from the beginning, so the code ended up being very adaptable.

I actually didn't realize all the implications of how I planned everything out. So far, when you save/load the game, due to good planning, if the game has already booted up once, it will still work! The only problem is if you save, exit the game, boot it back up and load, it fails. Luckily I know the problem, I just have to go in and fix it when I'm done with my other more important rewrite tasks.  I've still got a fairly daunting (to me) list of things I want to retool with my new techniques. They are getting checked off at a pace I'm happy with. More to come soon!

Great! I've also realized that when coding, the planning stage is really important.

Hopefully the save problem will be fixed easily