The first-pass card tiles were riddled with palette-0 transparent
pixels that let the felt background bleed through every rank
glyph, small suit, and big pip. At arm's length the cards looked
like they had green specks eating them. This commit rewrites all
of the card art from scratch:
- **Opaque card bodies.** Every pixel inside a card tile is now
either white (palette 2), red (1), or black (3). No `.` values
anywhere on a face or back tile. The green felt only shows
outside the card rectangle, where it should.
- **Readable rank glyphs.** The 13 rank tiles (A, 2-9, 10, J, Q, K)
are now drawn as bold black strokes on a solid white body. The
"holes" of the letters (e.g. the triangle inside an "A") are
white, not transparent.
- **16x16 big pips.** The big centre pip is now a 4-tile (16x16)
shape split into TL/TR/BL/BR quadrants per suit. Previously it
was a 2-tile (16x8) half-height strip that looked cramped. The
TL/TR quadrants kept their existing tile indices (28-35) so the
shift is local; the new BL/BR quadrants are appended after the
BIG WAR letters at tiles 88-95 to avoid renumbering the entire
alphabet / digits / UI tile range.
- **Distinct suit shapes.** Spade is a smooth teardrop with a
short stem and base; heart is two symmetric lobes with a V
bottom; diamond is a clean rhombus; club is three circles
joined over a stem. Side-by-side they are unmistakable.
- **Clean checkerboard card back.** The old card back was a
diamond lattice that had the same transparent-bleed problem
and looked noisy anyway. Replaced with a crisp 2-pixel black-
and-white checkerboard that tiles seamlessly across the card
back's 16x24 footprint.
- **draw_card_face now emits 6 sprites in a rank/suit + 4-tile
big-pip layout.** The previous 6-sprite layout was
`[rank][ssuit] / [pipL][pipR] / [blankL][blankR]`; the new
one is `[rank][ssuit] / [pipTL][pipTR] / [pipBL][pipBR]` with
the bottom row carrying the bottom half of the big pip
instead of being wasted blank tiles.
Also:
- New constants TILE_PIP_TL_BASE / TR / BL / BR replace the old
TILE_PIP_L_BASE / TILE_PIP_R_BASE in constants.ne.
- Refreshed war.nes and the goldens. Every emulator harness
test still passes (31/31).
https://claude.ai/code/session_0143dTgh3UeRrtfHgQwzcv5z
End-of-implementation polish for the War example after the
compiler bugs were fixed:
- Title state now calls draw_big_war_banner instead of inlining
12 draws — same pixel output, fewer lines.
- P_WAR_BURY redraws the previous round's face-up cards while
the noise thumps fire so the table doesn't look empty for
24 frames between the WAR banner and the new face-ups.
- Drop draw_word_war from render.ne (orphaned by the BIG WAR
metasprite).
- Refresh comments in background.ne (now references the real
felt tile) and deal_state.ne (drop the stale FRAMES_DEAL_STEP
reference now that the deal pace is hard-coded at 2 frames).
- README.md and examples/README.md gain a war row.
- PLAN.md marks every implementation step complete and records
the design revisions made along the way.
- Refresh the war audio hash to match the new ROM (the title
screen helper change shifts one frame of pulse-2 timing
enough to flip the FNV-1a). The frame-180 PNG is unchanged.
https://claude.ai/code/session_0143dTgh3UeRrtfHgQwzcv5z
The IrLowerer's wide_hi map records "this u8 temp's high byte
lives at this other temp" pairs whenever a 16-bit value is
produced. Both lower_function and lower_handler reset next_temp
to 0 at the start of each function, but neither cleared wide_hi
— so stale (low_id -> high_id) entries from earlier functions
leaked into subsequent ones.
When a fresh function reused those temp IDs for unrelated u8
expressions, is_wide() returned spurious true and widen() handed
back stale (lo, hi) pairs whose hi happened to coincide with the
*next* temp ID fresh_temp() was about to allocate. The result
was 16-bit IR ops (CmpEq16 in particular) where the destination
temp aliased one of the source operand high bytes — for War this
made `match phase` arms past P_WIN_B impossible to enter and the
game would freeze with both face-up cards on the table forever.
Fix: clear wide_hi alongside the next_temp reset in both
lower_function and lower_handler. Adds a regression test
(ir::tests::wide_hi_does_not_leak_between_functions) that
constructs a function whose body has no u16 ops but follows a
function that does, and asserts no CmpEq16 op aliases its dest
with an operand high byte.
Also:
- Convert the war Playing state's phase machine from an
if-chain to a `match`, which is what tripped this bug to the
surface (it was lurking in earlier ROMs too but their layouts
never produced the dest/source collision shape).
- Refactor begin_draw_a/b to set fly_card / fly_face_up via
globals before calling arm_fly, since arm_fly only takes 4
params (the v0.1 ABI limit, now diagnosed by E0506).
- Hoist the P_RESOLVE comparison result to the global pf_result
to dodge the param-clobbering issue documented in
examples/war/COMPILER_BUGS.md §2.
- Document the bug as item #6 in COMPILER_BUGS.md with a
minimal repro and reproducer-test pointer.
- Refresh the war golden + audio hash to match the new ROM.
https://claude.ai/code/session_0143dTgh3UeRrtfHgQwzcv5z
A complete, playable port of the card game War: title screen with
0/1/2 player menu, animated deal, sliding cards, deck-count HUD, a
"WAR!" tie-break with buried cards, and a victory screen with a
fanfare. Source split across examples/war/*.ne (constants, assets,
audio, deck/queue logic, RNG, render helpers, and one state file
per game state) and pulled in via examples/war.ne.
Drives nearly every NEScript subsystem at once: custom 88-tile
sprite sheet (card frames, ranks, suits, font, BIG WAR letters);
felt background nametable; pulse-1 / pulse-2 / noise sfx; looping
march on pulse 2; an 8-bit Galois LFSR PRNG; queue-based decks
that conserve cards across rounds; a phase machine inside the
Playing state that handles draw/reveal/win/war/check; and an
autopilot that boots straight into 0-PLAYERS mode so the headless
jsnes harness captures real gameplay at frame 180.
While building this I uncovered five compiler bugs / limitations
in the v0.1 implementation; each is documented with a minimal
reproduction, root cause, current workaround, and proposed fix in
examples/war/COMPILER_BUGS.md. The most painful was the
parameter-VarId aliasing one (#1b) — two functions sharing a
parameter NAME end up sharing a single zero-page slot mapping
across the whole program. Once those compiler bugs are fixed, the
workarounds in war/*.ne should be reverted in the same PR.
https://claude.ai/code/session_0143dTgh3UeRrtfHgQwzcv5z
