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Vector positioning optimization thoughts

For Vectrex Frogger I did in many cases not use BIOS functions, but ripped them and fitted them for my purposes. This was neccessary to fit the program into the tiny timescale of 30,000 cycles for one update round. One major cycle saving trick was done at a late stage of optimizing. It utilizes the idle phase during vector positioning. For some more information about this look at the documentation of Vectrex Frogger, the sourcecode and the 'progger.txt'. Here I will give another brief introduction to the idea I had. In the above documented BIOS function Moveto_d the last relevant lines of code are:

LF345:	BITB <VIA_int_flags 	;Wait for timer 1
	BEQ LF345

The positioning is usually done with quite a large scale factor. In Vectrex Frogger I often used $90 (or so). The above loop does nothing but check for the timer to expire. It is an iddle loop, that waits for nearly $90 cycles. After the loop is finnished not a single thing is done anymore, the routine is finnished and returns to its caller. You will see quickly, that a wait loop like that can be used to do more than just nothing. In a tightly packed program there are always some things to do, like collision checking, preparing the next vector drawing, positioning updating, decrementing timers or preparing sound output. All these things can be done during that waiting. HALT!

Not all things, you are not allowed to do anything that changes vector drawing relevant registers in the VIA chip, that applies to VIA_Port A, B, Shift register, Timer 1 and possibly a few others (control registers). That generally means, that you are not allowed to access VIA at all, that again means, no sound output, and no joystick inquiries, no new scaling value... But I experienced that, with clever programming MANY things can be done in that idle time. You do not have to worry about taking to long either, since the timer will expire all by itself. The only thing you have to watch out for is, that you don't finnish to early, since if you start drawing the vector when you have not finnished positioning the beam... well, you probably can imagine what happens. But making sure, that positioning has correctly finnished - all you need to do is put that little 'idle'-loop from above at the end of your intermediate section. Voila, you saved some really valuable time here!

The same thing can theoretically be applied to vector drawing. With drawing vectors you must make sure, that you finnish you intermediate stuff in time, so that you can switch the beam off in time, otherwise you will always see a bright dot at the end of your vectors. But generally speaking, the above optimization is not really such a good idea while drawing vectors. Since you usually have quite small timing figures (or at least SHOULD have). As mentioned above, Vectrex Frogger draws all 'sprites' using a scale factor of six. There is not all that much iddle time left. What I did is to skip the loop entirely, since ALL vectors I draw have the same scale value, I was able to put some fixed code into the drawing 'idle' time, so I DID save a few cycles here as well. But this is a field where you have to experiment individually for your program. I had to change my routines quite a few times, till I got them right for fitting in that 'idle' time. One major hog was the above mentioned uncertain time for some vector drawing related flags to arrive at the integration hardware. On the other hand, cycles saved in the routine for drawing single vectors is really, really, REALLY!!! important. Since you usually draw 'sprites' consisting of many vectors. And you'll probably draw many sprites. Imagine drawing 10 sprites, each using 20 vectors, that'll make 200 vectors. Now imaging your optiminzed code takes for each drawn vector 10 cycles less than the non optimized code. That would save about (or exactly in this example) 2,000 cycles. If you do a game where you will have not much time left you will appreciate these saved cycles very much!

For examples of the above mentioned routines look at Vectrex Frogger.

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