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Hitting ^C to quit the game (which is common practice) was leaving the screen in a no-scroll state, meaning the last line would just be overwritten repeatedly. This patch fixes it so no-scroll is turned off as soon as it is no longer needed.
Uses a little machine language program by Jim Irwin to write a bitmap to the screen. (Taken from ZODIAC.200).
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Example screenshot with solid pips: 
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I'm inclined to not accept this PR because it doesn't really add that much to the game, and makes the source code much more opaque (machine code) to users who want to learn from it. |
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Of course, it's your game and we'll do whatever you think best. I do believe that something like this is a needed change. On my Tandy 200, the circles are a strain to see as dice which makes the game less fun. I would have preferred to use a darker, built-in glyph, but the Tandy 200 lacks one. I see what you mean about making the code more opaque. Machine Language is not so easy to inspect and learn from! That said, if anything is the perfect introduction for a beginner and that may get them curious and wanting to explore M/L, it will be a tiny yet clearly useful routine like this. It is only eight bytes of code and eight bytes of bitmap data! I am only beginning with 8085 assembly and found it a fun challenge to figure out how the bitmap data was being drawn so I could create my own for this game. Perhaps others will feel similarly? |
Also, inline more subroutines to make Farkle faster.
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By the way, github thought there was a conflict for this and my other pull request, so I've cleaned it up by cherry-picking your RND commit. |
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Uses a little machine language program by Jim Irwin to write a bitmap of a dot
to the screen. (Taken from ZODIAC.200).
This also includes the previous pull request (noscroll) which can now be ignored.