Lander opens on a splash, with music

The first customer for the player outside the program it was pulled out
of, and the argument for doing it: a splash needs no resident player at
all. Nothing else is happening while the logo is up, so Lander owns the
timer and all four channels exactly as Play does. Music UNDER a running
game is still deferred, and still the harder problem.

It polls the timer rather than being interrupted by it. Lander has no
vector segment and waits for the screen by reading port 0x30, so it waits
for a beat by reading port 0x50 - the same shape, and it brings no
handler that would have to be taken away before the game starts.

The tune is read off the disk. A missing one means the logo and silence
and the game starts anyway, the way a missing /lander.state means the
defaults stand.

FOUR THINGS THIS COST, each found by running it:

A subroutine cannot answer in A. CALL saves and restores it, so splashSkip
handed its caller back the A it already had - the channel number of the
last stepVoice - and the splash ended on its first pass whatever anybody
pressed. Q is what survives a RET, which nextRandom says twenty lines
away and I did not read.

Port 0x3D is how many window rows are SHOWN, and it is two once putGauge
runs and nothing before. A line written to row eleven went somewhere real
and was displayed nowhere.

A nought is not a keypress. It is what a recorded keyboard file holds
while nobody is typing, and a splash that took it for a key is one no
test could ever watch.

And skipping has to be free. Asked after blanking the window and reading
the file, a skipped splash still cost a fifth of a second - enough to
push the thruster test's early capture past the frame it looks at. Asked
first, it costs a pad read.

player.asm no longer asks a caller for Order0 to Order3: the voice records
name NoOrder instead, so a program whose tune comes from a file does not
have to define four order lists it never uses. That was the file case
finding a wart in the contract.

Every other Lander test now skips the splash with a space - a key the
game itself ignores, since it answers to q, z and the arrows - so they go
on testing what they tested. The one in sound.sh presses nothing, which
is what makes it the one that hears the music.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
This commit is contained in:
Anachronaut
2026-09-06 10:06:20 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 6bb1565dea
commit 00b31b88af
17 changed files with 392 additions and 52 deletions
+4 -3
View File
@@ -27,14 +27,15 @@ Mode.sbx 48
Flip.sbx 173
Sprite.sbx 442
Depth.sbx 672
Lander.sbx 9361
Lander.sbx 11260
Pad.sbx 264
Crash.sbx 632
vars.script 50
blocks.script 343
loops.script 272
splash.tune 218
tune.sbx 318
Play.sbx 2525
Play.sbx 2526
notes.txt 21
Apps <dir>
hi.script 121
@@ -45,7 +46,7 @@ nonl.script 38
outer.script 376
inner.script 44
loop.script 35
30 files, 1 directory
31 files, 1 directory
> exit
halted
Execution halted.