[stella] weirdness with Darkmage 4k and Stella debugger

[SeaGtGruff at aol.com]

In a message dated 8/5/2007 2:34:16 AM Eastern Daylight Time,  
kennedy.greg at gmail.com writes:

SeaGtGruff at aol.com wrote:
> Your post comes just when I was  starting to pick up the pieces of my 
> 2600 Sudoku WIP
Interesting,  I was _just_ considering the possibility of doing a Sudoku 
for 2600  earlier this evening.  Is it really so complex that you need  
bankswitching to get it going?

-Greg



I think you can do Sudoku without bankswitching-- see John Payton's  
(supercat's) demo of a Sudoku game screen at AtariAge 
(_http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=90359_ 
(http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=90359) )--  but I was using the E7 (M-Network) bankswitching method so I 
could use the extra  2K of RAM to partially bitmap the screen, since I want to be 
able to display a  grid of dots in each cell for indicating which digits are 
possible (or not  possible, depending on your preferred method of "scratch 
work") in each cell.  You can see my E7 work on Sudoku at AtariAge 
(_http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=89885&hl=sudoku_ 
(http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=89885&hl=sudoku) ).  Unfortunately, I don't 
think it's possible to create new carts using E7  bankswitching-- at least, not 
yet-- so I decided to upgrade my Sudoku WIP to  4A50 bankswitching, since I'm 
more likely to be able to get 4A50 carts produced.  I don't actually need 128K 
of ROM and 32K of RAM to do Sudoku, but all of that  ROM and RAM would 
definitely allow for a lot of bells and whistles! :)
 
Here is a screenshot of my E7 Sudoku screen, after I modified the graphics  
data for the digits:
 

 
The extra cells above and to the left of the grid are going to be used in  
solving the puzzle-- e.g., put a "4" in one of those extra cells to have the  
program flag (dot) each cell in that row or column which can (or cannot)  
possibly contain a "4." I didn't get that far with the E7 WIP-- you can move the  
blue cursor around and use the joystick to scroll/cycle through the digits in a  
given cell, and you can actually fill in the entire grid with the correct  
digits, so the WIP is more or less playable, but far from finished,  and buggy 
(e.g., the screen rolls when cycling through the digits, and you  can change 
the digits in the "given" cells). I'm attaching the BIN, but you'll  need to 
select the E7 cart format when running it in Stella or z26. The source  code 
(sans the updated graphics for the digits) is posted at AtariAge.
 
Michael
 
 



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