I've been shuffling around the C64 code and data for a couple of reasons really. 1st It means I can use the music as is without having it relocate it, and second buy changing the VIC bank to $4000-$7fff it gives me a few extra sprites. It got me going for a while though until I discovered a bug in my IRQ code which was always setting a bit in the screen address, this meant I could only have screens at $0400 and $0c00 and it took me a while to track down exactly why this was. Vice came to the rescue with a reasonable debugger, although I really wish they would add some basic symbol table support. Being able to put a breakpoint on a label address is a godsend! Anyway, bug fixed, code and data all moved around... and I now have 160 sprite slots, and a few more above the panel.
I also workout out that if I changed the format of the +4 sprite a little, I could squeze in 199 sprites, quite a bit up on the 167 we already have! It depends if I get around it it... its not a huge change as it just involves making a 300 byte xply table and changing the cache pointers from pointers to indexes (theres only 147). But that would save 8 bytes per sprite * 167 sprites... a lot! I hope I get a chance to make the change, although Luca might not thank me, he already has a lot of space to fill!
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