Update is in the works

I've been working on and off over the past year to pull together an update, hoping to again improve performance of the engine. There has been a lot of work on various parts of the code over the past year, most contentiously I changed an assumption about how memory was fetched. It did make the codebase smaller, however, there were a small number of games that ran a touch slower in real world tests.

That made me sit on the updates for some time. Since then I've been chipping away at optimising the routine that was negatively impacted, and managed to bring things back to being worst case on par with previous performance, while best case came out further ahead.

Now that was completed, I decided to jump further into the code and have rewritten the dictionary search code which feels a little like open heart surgery. It seems to work so far (still under testing) and has further improved the execution speed while making the code smaller again.

Throughout this time, there was a cosmetic bug reported which I hadn't been able to fix, until now. With the extra focus on the code I've been able to clean up a long-standing bug (caused by over-optimization...). Once I'm confident it's good to go, I'll update all the disk images accordingly. In the meantime, here's the bug in action, and the fixed version. You can see you gain 2 extra lines of text in this particular case on a TRS-80 with a screen width of 64 characters. There's a largely common codebase, so all versions benefit.

before:

after: