Not as much time for code, things like work get in the way!

I've decided to drop SWIFT as a development IDE; it's only really well integrated with Ophis, which is a tad too commodorey for my liking. Instead I've gone to BeebASM and notepad++. One of the advantages is that I can edit my code, reassemble it and then tab across to beebem and just test it.

I did a bit of a redesign, deciding to abstract output routines (in case I want to window them, or give them a half-size mode 5 font). I've also been writing search routines, so for important things I can just set A to the number and do a simple JSR.

To get an output, I hacked together the room outputting code. Whilst the description is relatively sorted, the exits were hacked just so I could have something to display - I'll need a better way to display system messages in future. in the screen shot I manually set A and called the routine, as my initalisation routine also does a mode 7; so this really wouldn't have made a good screen shot!

What the attached screen shot also shows is something I'd forgotten from the specification: rooms are normally preceded with a system message (either You are in a or I am in a), but they may also start with an "*", which tells the engine not to display the system message nor the "*". This resulted in a bit of code I'm not particularly proud of:

               lda workbuffer

               cmp #'*'

               beq skipone

               ldx #youare MOD 256

               ldy #youare DIV 256

               jsr printbuf

.skipone   ldx #workbuffer MOD 256

               ldy #workbuffer DIV 256

               lda workbuffer

               cmp #'*'

               bne printit

               inx

               bne printit

               iny

.printit      jsr printbuf

I'm sure that the second lda workbuffer:cmp #0 is superfluous, but I couldn't think of an easier route for the moment.