An issue I have hit early in development is I am running out of memory. Completely expected as I was not watering down any of the arcade assets upto now, and to be fair I was wondering how I was getting away with it.

That said, this is where I have to start considering all of the graphics that are being loaded into chipram at any one point.

The current limit I’m hitting is once I go over about 110 frames of animation frames at this size, it can runs out of memory. Combine those animation frames with 512 tiles and it is understandable. And this is without loading any music in.

So it is inevitable that we are going to have to cut a fair few animations if we are to have a variety of enemies on screen but there are some options available.

Looking at the tiled map I can easily edit it down to 2/3 of the original memory size without much visual impact, and can probably go alot further.

We can also cut the walking up animation frames from each character.

Each character has left and right punches, this could be reduced to one.

Also there are many frames for being hit and falling that could be reduced without necessarily looking worse.

These are all things to consider but I will test out alot of things to ensure we get the best result possible.