Yesterday was a pretty good day for messing with Elusion of the Dead. Well, the past couple of days, I suppose. I had made a nice intro cinema using the graphics that Dave had drawn up, and posted a video of it in a couple of places. It seems to have gotten a warm reception, so that’s definitely a bonus hehe I have the video here for you to see, but it has a glitch in the screen update after the “looking at the watch” scene, which has since been fixed.

Elusion of the Dead: Intro Cinema

Anyway, I went through some rewriting of how some things are handled. For instance, palettes. Usually to write to a palette during gameplay, I would have to wait for vblank, point to the actual palette byte(s) that I wanted to update, then turn the screen back on. Kind of a hassle to hardcode it in such a way, to be honest. I’m now using RAM for my palette, which in turn I refresh during every NMI. This way I can just write to the spot in RAM I want to have changed, and then it will update on the next NMI. It’s such a relief not having to do the whole “PPU off/PPU on” thing! This gave me a problem though.

When refreshing the palette, the PPU is set to the place you last manipulated the palette with… or something weird like that. I had a weird deal pop up because I wasn’t restoring the $2006 register to the nametable I was using (scrolling with 2400 nametable). So I ended up having to set up a reserve byte for whenever I am switching nametables, it can be restored in NMI. Craziness, but it worked!

I’m probably not going to be doing much work today because the Bears are playing. Here’s to hoping the Lions don’t somehow break their losing streak today! Oh, and speaking of football or sports in general, be sure to check out my buddy Don’s (aka geniusGZA) site. He is the author of the old basicNES emulator, and he’s a pretty chill guy, too. He has a blog up and all that jazz, so you can peek in on him and see what he’s up to at times.

But yeah, go Bears!