great stuff Simplethinker

@calc84 well i was getting worried about the future of F-Zero and Mario from time to time as progress slowed down and when you left for about 2 weeks not so long ago so I would be worried if you started a 3rd project lol

you should finish F-Zero/Mario at least first

I'm trying to get as many of the original levels (there are 150) as possible.  The enemies pose the biggest problem if I want decent speed.  Of the first 90 levels, there are only 30 I know can be done and another 23 that might be possible.

As for size, the engine is currently 1496 bytes, and I'm estimating no more than 1000 on top of that.  Except for the early levels, each level is 32x32 tiles wide, so the matrix will take up 9kb of RAM during gameplay.  Each level's data is currently occupying it's own program, which is ~3.5kb, but depending on how I implement the enemies (if I ever do) it could add more, though I'm not sure how much.  If the proportion of levels I can do is about the same for higher levels, the game will be around 180kb with 50 levels.

Right now, I'm taking a small break to learn Asm and write some supplementary programs to either speed-up or simplify/stream-line level loading and a little display.  They're essentially xLIB and Celtic 2/3 with some tweaking and should hopefully cut the program size down.  One of the Asm programs is for copying one pic to another without altering the Graph Screen, which will save me 2301 bytes of RAM while running (the way I have the wall-toggle switches working involves some extra pics that are redundant).  Another will store a string into a matrix (every 2 tokens will be the hex value of the tile's number for the xLIB tilemapper) with the added feature that an extra copy of the matrix won't be in Ans (since I would need over 18kb of free RAM otherwise).  The fact that it's converted from a string means each level's map data will be no more than 2048 bytes.  I'm also contemplating writing something similar (but more specific to my game) to Celtic2's readline function to stream-line level loading.

Learning Asm (and my current play-through of FF III spurred by a random discussion on IRC) is the reason why there have been few updates the last week or so two weeks (it's been longer than I thought ), so in case anyone's wondering: I'm still working on this

I was a bit worried about lack of progress but I thought it was christmas. Are you planning to rewrite this in ASM or stick to BASIC? I think you should do the latter and maybe once it's done if you want you can make an enhanced version in ASM with more enemies

I'll be sticking with BASIC.  What I am writing in Asm are just slight modifications of functions I was using with xLIB/Celtic 2 (or what I would be using if Celtic III were finished _{hint hint}).  After I finish, I might rewrite it in Asm as practice, and adding enemies in sounds like a great idea!  But, I'll stick to one thing at a time as my Asm skills are still severely lacking and I don't multitask well

so being that this is a port, how are you gona store all those levels from the computer game. i plaed this game alot. and i just remember getting discouraged because the levels were like really hard but they just kept coming. idk thats just what i thought of when i read about this game. anyway i think is  a great idea, this game seems perfect for the calc. good luck

There is 149 levels in the original level pack, and there are lots of different level packs..

sounds great, We'll be sure to keep you updating us!

Oooh I see you are learning ASM. Halo 83+ coming soon then? (>^.^)>

jk doN't give up and keep up the good work

Yep , then nope .  Around winter break has been my yearly failed attempt at learning Asm, but for some reason this year I failed at failing and it finally clicked in my brain