Separate title screen from main game

[Brick Nash]

Hi folks,

I'm in the final stages of doing my ASM written game demo and I'm trying to clean things up.

At the moment I have a title screen which is just a loop displaying the bitmap logo graphic and bitmap font text, and this loop is the first thing in the program. It then jumps to the main game init and then finally the main loop when I push a button on the gamepad.

The problem is that it's all run from essentially the same program, and obviously I don't want nor need the title screen code or its assets taking up memory when the main game starts. So, I want to find a way to separate them both, but unfortunately I can't seem to think of a way to do this.

None of the tutorials I've watched cover things like this either.

I'm defining spaces for assets so that stuff can be loaded in from disk later on, but even if I clear the spaces which hold the title screen graphics, won't that space still be defined and reserved, and ergo - unusable?

As usual, there's next to no information on this out there, so I really don't know what to do. Is it possible to have it in a completely different include file, but using its own sections for code and data? Again, how would this effectively be disposed on and re-loaded when needed?

So many questions!

Any info would be great, thanks.

[a/b]

One way to do it... Put your title screen code+data into separate sections (eg. section 1 title code, section 2 title data, section 3 main code, section 4 main data, etc).
When the title loop is done, unlink sections 3+ from the segment list and create a new process with section 3 as the start segment and simply return via rts, the OS will then deallocate first 2 sections.
There is one more thing you have to do before you exit your main code, instead of the final rts you have to jump to UnloadSegment() to free the rest of your sections because the segment list passed to CreateProcess() is not freed automatically.

[Thomas Richter]

Sounds like a perfect example for what overlayed segments are good for. It requires special linking and an overload loader, and some knowledge, but with that, only the required segments are in memory and the Os loader will only pull in what is needed.

http://aminet.net/docs/misc/Overlay.lha

[Brick Nash]

Great info, thanks!

I had never heard of segment lists before, so that's helpful to explore. Is it just for OS use? I'm turning the OS off in the init, so would that make a difference?

[mcgeezer]

Yes, I feel your pain a bit here.

The way I've done it is I simply keep a track of all of my memory allocations and their sizes, I can also tag them.

I then have a routine which can deallocate all the allocations within the same program or just some of them by tag.

Geezer

[Brick Nash]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

Yes, I feel your pain a bit here.

The way I've done it is I simply keep a track of all of my memory allocations and their sizes, I can also tag them.

I then have a routine which can deallocate all the allocations within the same program or just some of them by tag.

Geezer

That sounds just the ticket!

How do you actually de-allocate a reserved block of memory though? I've looked for something like uds.b (un-define space) or anything which will just remove the memory reservation, but once its defined it seems to stay there.

[a/b]

It's how OS is tracking sections so they can be freed when a program exits. It's public/documented knowledge, and quite simple to do (~10 lines of code). For example:

_LVOCreateProc		EQU	-138
_LVOUnLoadSeg		EQU	-156

	SECTION	LoaderCode,CODE

Loader	jsr	WaitLMB

; OPEN DOS LIBRARY HERE (i'm too lazy :) )
	move.l	a6,DosBase

; RELEVANT BEGIN
	lea	LastLoaderSection-4,a0
	move.l	#ProcName,d1
	moveq	#0,d2			; priority
	move.l	(a0),d3			; seglist bptr
	clr.l	(a0)			; unlink main sections
	move.l	#4096,d4		; stack size
	jsr	_LVOCreateProc(a6)
; RELEVANT END

	moveq	#0,d0
	rts


	SECTION	LoaderData,DATA

LastLoaderSection
ProcName	DC.B	'fubar',0
	EVEN
	DS.B	64*1024


	SECTION	MainCode,CODE
FirstMainSection
	bsr.b	WaitLMB

	move.l	DosBase,a6

; RELEVANT BEGIN
	move.l	#FirstMainSection-4,d1
	lsr.l	#2,d1			; convert to bptr
	jmp	_LVOUnLoadSeg(a6)	; program exit
; RELEVANT END

WaitLMB
.W1	btst	#6,$bfe001
	bne.b	.W1
.W2	btst	#6,$bfe001
	beq.b	.W2
	rts


	SECTION	MainData,DATA
DosBase	DC.L	0
	DS.B	256*1024

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by Brick Nash

That sounds just the ticket!

How do you actually de-allocate a reserved block of memory though? I've looked for something like uds.b (un-define space) or anything which will just remove the memory reservation, but once its defined it seems to stay there.

Once you AllocMem() and then FreeMem() your allocations are still there?

Use WinUAE's TM command to track your memory allocations.

[Brick Nash]

Excellent! Thanks for the advice guys. Plenty to chew on here.