Title screen

Thanks to the sample code of really smart people out there, I now have a working title screen!

The hardest part was similar to the last problems I talked about: cycle timings getting messed up while crossing a page boundary.

To get a nice large "hi-res" graphic on the atari, you have to take both sprite objects, tell the Atari to repeat them 3 times close together, and then stagger them.  (Imagine the 3 repeated planes on Combat, or the 3 players on Football. Then imagine 2 sets of those interleaved with each other) That gets you halfway there, but then you have to very exact timings to update the sprite's graphic data mid-scanline.  Because the Atari is so doggone slow, the timings are really tricky. (Although the technique eventually became fairly well-known -- any game with a 6-digit score display most likely used this technique).

I got the code all working thanks to that sample code I posted to above, but if I fiddled much with the graphics data, the timings would get off by 1 clock cycle, and it would fail. Turns out, again, that it was crossing a page boundary. This time with a LDA instruction (loading the accumulator from memory) -- if you do a "LDA foo,X" command, which loads the accumulator with whatever byte is at memory location (foo + the value of the X register), and foo+X crosses a page boundary from foo, it takes 5 cycles instead of 4.

Luckily the assembler gives you a nice "align" pseudo-opcode that lets you force alignment of your data into page boundaries, which fixed it.

After getting the title displayed, I wanted to make it pretty. I have 8 whole clock cycles free per line to do what I want with, but to update the color of the whole thing, I have to write to 2 registers (COLUP0 and COLUP1, the color registers for each sprite), which alone takes 6 cycles. There's not enough time left to pick or calculate the color for the scanline.

So I unrolled the kernel loop by half, which lets me use 16 clock cycles every 2 lines. That's plenty of time to load a base color, add to it based on the current line, and then write it to the color registers. The end result is a pretty animated title graphic:

Right now the PASSWD option doesn't do anything :-(

The half-unrolled loop ended up looking like:
.loop:
    sty     tmpVar              ; 3

    ;update the color
    tya                         ; 2
    adc     PlayerColorDef      ; 3
    sta     COLUP0              ; 3 = 11

    lda     (ptr+$0),y          ; 5
    sta     GRP0                ; 3
    lda     (ptr+$2),y          ; 5
    sta     GRP1                ; 3
    lda     (ptr+$4),y          ; 5
    sta     GRP0                ; 3
    lda     (ptr+$6),y          ; 5
    sta     tmpVar2             ; 3 = 32

    lax     (ptr+$a),y          ; 5
    lda     (ptr+$8),y          ; 5
    ldy     tmpVar2             ; 3
    sty     GRP1                ; 3        
    sta     GRP0                ; 3
    stx     GRP1                ; 3
    sta     GRP0                ; 3 = 25

    ldy     tmpVar              ; 3
    dey                         ; 2

    ;burning 3 cycles in place of the bpl since the loop is half-unrolled
    sty     tmpVar              ;3 (in place of the bpl)


    sty     tmpVar              ; 3

    ;update the color
    tya                         ; 2
    adc     PlayerColorDef      ; 3
    sta     COLUP1              ; 3 = 11

    lda     (ptr+$0),y          ; 5
    sta     GRP0                ; 3
    lda     (ptr+$2),y          ; 5
    sta     GRP1                ; 3
    lda     (ptr+$4),y          ; 5
    sta     GRP0                ; 3
    lda     (ptr+$6),y          ; 5
    sta     tmpVar2             ; 3 = 32

    lax     (ptr+$a),y          ; 5
    lda     (ptr+$8),y          ; 5
    ldy     tmpVar2             ; 3
    sty     GRP1                ; 3         
    sta     GRP0                ; 3
    stx     GRP1                ; 3
    sta     GRP0                ; 3 = 25

    ldy     tmpVar              ; 3
    dey                         ; 2

    bpl     .loop               ; 2/3 =  7/8