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Elite on the BBC Micro and NES

Utility routines: IRQ1

[Acorn Electron version]

Name: IRQ1 [Show more] Type: Subroutine Category: Utility routines Summary: The main interrupt handler (IRQ1V points here)
Context: See this subroutine in context in the source code References: This subroutine is called as follows: * S% (Part 1 of 2) calls IRQ1
.IRQ1 LDA S%+6 \ Flip all the bits in S%+6 so it toggles between 0 and EOR #%11111111 \ &FF with each call to this routine (and set A to the STA S%+6 \ new value) ORA KEYB \ If we are currently reading from the keyboard with an \ OS command (OSWORD or OSRDCH) then KEYB will be &FF \ rather than 0, so A now contains the following: \ \ * 0 if both S%+6 and KEYB are 0 \ \ * &FF if either of S%+6 or KEYB are &FF BMI jvec \ If bit 7 of A is set, jump to jvec to skip the \ following and process the interrupt as normal \ We only get here if S%+6 = 0 and KEYB = 0, so we only \ do the following every other call to the interrupt \ handler, and only if we are not already reading from \ the keyboard with an OS command \ \ The following clears all interrupts, so the net effect \ of all this logic is that interrupts are only serviced \ 50% of the time (unless the keyboard is being read, in \ which case interrupts are serviced while this is the \ case) \ \ On the unexpanded Electron, the only interrupts that \ trigger a call to IRQ1 are the following: \ \ * High Tone Detect \ * Real Time Clock (RTC) \ * Display End \ \ The first one only occurs when the tape input receives \ ten successive bits of high tone, which won't happen \ during a typical game of Elite, so the only interrupts \ that will bring us here are the RTC and Display End \ interrupts \ \ Each of these fires 50 times a second, essentially \ combining to give a 100Hz clock tick, so the logic \ above skips every other interrupt, meaning we only \ service half of the interrupts, one every 50Hz, and we \ simply ignore the other half \ \ This might be an attempt to speed things up, as \ neither interrupt is actually used by the game code LDA VIA+&05 \ On the surface, this code would appear to set bit 5 of ORA #%00100000 \ the "interrupt clear and paging" register at SHEILA STA VIA+&05 \ &05, to clear the RTC interrupt \ \ However, SHEILA &05 is a read-only location, so the \ LDA always returns &FF, which in turn means that this \ code always sets SHEILA &05 to &FF, irrespective of \ which interrupt got us here \ \ This code therefore clears all interrupts (even NMI \ interrupts) rather than just the RTC interrupt, by \ setting bits 4 to 7, and it also pages out the BASIC \ ROM by setting bits 0 to 3, though that doesn't have \ any effect here \ \ Interestingly, if the code worked as it was originally \ intended and only cleared the RTC interrupt, then this \ wouldn't necessarily have the desired effect, as we \ don't check anywhere that this is actually the RTC \ interrupt that we are processing; luckily, clearing \ all interrupts will definitely clear the interrupt \ that got us here, whatever it is, so this code still \ does what we want \ \ Given this, the LDA and ORA could be replaced by a \ single LDA #&FF instruction to give us the same effect \ but slightly more efficiently LDA &FC \ Restore the value of A from before the call to the \ interrupt handler (the MOS stores the value of A in \ location &FC before calling the interrupt handler) RTI \ Return from interrupts, so this interrupt is not \ passed on to the next interrupt handler, but instead \ the interrupt terminates here .jvec JMP (S%+2) \ Jump to the original value of IRQ1V to process the \ interrupt as normal