Getting stuff done

I finally got inspired to buckle down and get more done tonight. Partially because Chris (The amazing guy who did the graphics for Anguna) asked me today how it was going, which always reminds me to get to work. It sounds like he's interested in possibly doing some new fancier splash/cut scenes and enemy artwork for the DS port, which would be cool.

Sound effects are now completely working. The last little thing I had to do was deal with the fact that my effects needed to be played at different frequencies...on the GBA, my audio player handled that for me somehow, but here I needed to tell it what frequency to play at.

I unfortunately spent an hour or so fighting with MikMod about how it loads song data into memory. I really need to dig into the source of that library and see what it is doing, because it appears that I can overwrite my song data by loading background tiles into vram. That certainly shouldn't be right, but through trial and error, I've determined that if I load tiles at a certain point in my code, the song is corrupted and won't play. If I don't load the tiles, the song is fine. I've got a workaround in place now, but it doesn't make me happy. And I left my microSD writer at work, so I can't test my workaround on the DS until tomorrow.

The other bummer is that MikMod refuses to play the song that I previously used as intro music. (Hurtless by Magic Fred) I'm not sure how much time to spend fiddling with the song file to see if I can get it to play, or ditch the song and just use the 2 other pieces, or if I should try to find a different song to use for opening music. I'll have to think about that.

I also fixed my minimap bug, which turned out to be not one, but two different bugs. One was that I wasn't loading enough graphical data for the overworld minimap. The other was that somewhere along the line of refactoring things, I had a function that infinitely recursively called itself (when it was supposed to be calling something else). Silly me.

I finished up the evening by fiddling with the opening splash screens....putting my "Bite the chili" logo on the top screen while Chris's SpriteAttack logo is on the bottom screen, and getting everything cleaned up to work happily on the DS.

The other fun news is that Cearn sent me some assembly routines for doing fast fill/copies. I mentioned before that I needed to switch to assembly, as DMA was driving me crazy, so this should do the trick. I'll see if I can get those working and integrated next....