Cruiser X-79 June Update #2

 20th June 2021

Since I have more or less run out of other C64 projects to work on, and pretty much up to date with everything. I decided to work a bit more on Cruiser-X 79. It has actually been a whole day's session. Yes, that's right, about 8 hours or so. I needed to get a lot of things done today and I had nothing else to do. Considering the weather has been rubbish today also.

The first part of today's session was working on the music and additional jingles. I loaded up Goat Tracker and I experimented a little with the music to come up with some suitable in game music. I ended up doing 3 different tunes. The initial  plan is for the game to have only 4 different in game tunes. All of the tunes turned out more upbeat, and the well done and game over jingles sound familiar to the level 1 jingle. 

The next part was slightly more painful. The easiest part was to setup the filename properties. The second part actually gave me a real headache to work on. The disk access multi-load system. I tried compressing the test level graphics, character set and map as well as the music for the game. Unfortunately, however the de-crunch routine was crashing all the time. 

I discovered that the music memory is at $1000, and I cannot unpack a music file at $1000 when it loads to that address with Exomizer. I also had issues with memory management. I had no spare memory to place packed data. So I decided to leave out the Exomizer level compression for the time-being and load the test files as unpacked data. The program worked, but loading time takes a bit longer. 

I might need to find some alternative to the mem -l packing in Exomizer. If there is a load and decrunch on the fly method, then I might consider using that method. Otherwise I might have to do the level packing the more slower way, using a Level Squeezer and unpack from the level unpacker code. We will have to wait and see.

Update 21/06/2021 - I scanned through the memory area using the Action Replay Machine Code Monitor, after testing the game and found there was plenty of memory where I could load the packed data and de-crunch the data with the Exodecrunch wrap.s. Since the size of each packed file was less than 4K, and there was just over 4K memory free. I used the memory nearest to the last $100 bytes at the end of the game memory for loading and de-crunching the data. Everything seems to be working fine, although bugs in the title screen and the game still remain - but they should not be a problem to fix.