Scramble (arcade game remake)

[madscijr]

Hardware images? Yes, that would absolutely be the way to get most performance from the game. I played around with these briefly on an earlier 3D morphing project that I made in QB64pe. It would take some fiddling around but probably not all that much. Most of the game would just work as-is almost I would imagine. Can you blit a portion of a sprite sheet to the screen with hardware images? If so then it'll be fine. The only area that would need a little extra work would be the background strips. These are created on the fly and cached but you could still create them on the fly to a temporary software handle and then copy them over to hardware images. I doubt I'll have time to look into this tonight but maybe tomorrow evening or over the weekend. Let me know if you get it sorted in the meantime though!

Yes, you can absolutely copy a portion of the sprite sheet to the screen. 
I haven't touched the hardware image code in a year, and I wasn't that comfortable with it to begin with. 
Also I'm not too familiar with how your game draws graphics (the palette stuff is particularly alien to me), so I probably will leave it to you. 
But I look forward to seeing the results whenever you get around to it - it should speed things up considerably.

From what I recall, if you wanted to display a given tile in more than one color, with hw images, you can't do stuff like change the palette on the fly. Instead, you would create a tilesheet for each color (or a giant multi-tilesheet tilesheet) and then locate the tile in the given color and copy it over. 
(DISCLAIMER: my grasp on this stuff is shaky at best, if you have questions Steve or the other folks here should be able to help.)
I'm not sure about the background, I think you would just pre-render copies ahead of time of whatever images, in whatever colors you will need, and then in the game, copy the given background in the right color, and then copy the tiles over that? I'm really not sure, but the guys here can definitely help with that.

Happy hunting!

Well, there were a handful of caveats to dance around but it's up and running with hardware sprites now. I've set your x8 detail sprites as the default. Try setting $LET HARDWARE_SPRITES = 0 and you'll see the difference that it makes!

I've totally disabled the palette switching code when $LET HI_RES = 1 is set. You'll need different batches of sprites for different colours if you want to re-implement that. As you hated the garish colours, you could just repaint the default grey sprites with colours that you like.

Give me a shout if you run across any problems or have any questions.

Fantastic! I'm away from the PC but look forward to trying this out over the weekend!