Retro Challenge Postmortem

The contest deadline has passed, my entry is in, I delivered everything I said I would, and I even threw in corrected math coefficients thanks to phyber0pt1k on the MC10 yahoo group.  Thanks for the contribution.

However, I had hoped for a greater speed improvement.  I implemented a LOT of optimizations on a test version of of the interpreter, but I ran into some problems with that many changes implemented all at once, and I think there was an issue with the initial ROM I started with.  I had to backtrack and create a clean ROM image and go from there.  Given the time remaining on the project it was better to play it safe than include minimally tested optimizations, especially when most of them only offered small performance gains.  

To make matters worse, I was chasing down a syntax error my ELSE test code was throwing up to 11:50 PM.  I had commented out the ELSE keyword for some unknown reason and it wasn't being tokenized.  I spend over an hour stepping through code trying to figure out why the ELSE code wasn't being called.    

After adding the ELSE statement, there are still 26 BYTEs of unused ROM, and there are some other space/speed optimizations that should improve on that.  Hopefully this will leave enough room for some optimizations that require more space  than the original code.

And finally, this might not have been the best choice of projects for a contest.  There are no fancy graphics or animation, no hardware to take photos of, and... well... in spite of the difficulty level there just isn't a lot to see.  The confines of an 8K ROM don't really allow any dramatic changes in speed that are going to really be obvious on video.