The coding period has started and I managed to make some decent progress this week. However I did hit a major roadblock which has had me stumped for the last few days.
C64 support has reached the point where it seems to handle games without any special decompression. This include 11 Mysterious Adventures which were the first games to be tested. The ones which do need to be decompressed (or decrunched) are a mixed bag.
I started with Robin of Sherwood and that worked fine. I then moved to Gremlins and unfortunately a variant of the game wouldn’t work. Thanks to Petter (the original author) for letting me know about garglk a few weeks ago as that would give me a better way to debug my code.
I managed to setup it on my Windows laptop thanks to WSL but it seemed to have problems with that variant of Gremlins too. I initially thought that this meant that the game wasn’t supported by spatterlight either but after talking to Petter about it, he found out a bug which was causing it to not work. He fixed it promptly (along with some other bugs) and the game does indeed work properly on spatterlight.
I now have a working piece of code to compare my version to and hopefully fixing this bug won’t take a lot of time now. If everything goes fine then I might even finish working on scott by the time the next blog post comes out ?
That was it for this week. Thanks for reading and see you next week!