While waiting for my PCB I decided to go back and experiment more with the prototype. I wrote a program that should draw a vertical line that moves across the screen. In the video you can see a few problems. First of all, the line is flashing. Interestingly though, there are a few pixels that are not flashing. 8 of them to be exact. Does this mean that 7 out of 8 of the data lines are flaky? I will wait until I get the PCB back to see if this is still an issue. The second problem is that it is just not fast enough. Currently, I am buffering the display in a 1k block of memory, and copying the whole block to the SSD1305 chip for every single frame.

To improve the frames per second, I will adopt a strategy of only copying dirty regions to the display. I plan to write some routines in assembly to deal with sprites, and keep track of the portions of screen that that dirty as they move. I will also introduce the concept of "playfield graphics", inspired by the Atari which will take care the game background and surroundings. I will support 8x8 tiles for the playfield which will be very quick to copy around to compose the image.