While in scr4, switching to scr5/6/7/8 during vblank and executing copy commands is feasible, does anyone have ideas for exploiting this feature?
Tiles definition:
Does anyone have in mind some nice way for using the VDP logical commands for dynamic pattern definition?
In order to have parallax, I was considering scr6 logical copy (that can move the patterns of 2 bits), but as far as I can see, the best solution seems to have a bulk of pre-computed patterns to copy with fast copy (in scr8 or scr5 now is irrelevant).
Any suggestion?
Animation:
Using tpset on the logical map, it should be possible to move large objects made of tiles like they where in scr5. This BEFORE copyng the tiles from the logical map to the scr4 page.
On this side things seem easy, unfortunately in order to do 8 direction VDP scrolling the logical map needs to be scrambled (look at the code), so square blocks of tiles have to be split in multiple copy commands...If anyone has the will to open the pandora pot looking the algorithm behind the code he/she is welcome.
Sprite definition:
Here it is easy, as the sprite patters are 32 (4 colors per line) one could store in vram the color definitions corresponding to those patterrns, with and without the blody EC bit active.
This means that wasting 16*2*32*2 = 2048 bytes of VRAM you can copy on fly the color definition of any sprite definition in any sprite plane.
Each copy moves 16*2 bytes (4 colors per lines => 2 sprite planes) and you could need up to 32 pattern to be animated corresponding up to 32 fast copy commands with 32 bytes each.
Any further idea?