Linecrunch
Linecrunch is a VIC-tweak that allows you to move the entire screen upwards, by (as the name suggests) “crunching” 8-pixel char-lines down to a single pixel-line. The biggest advantage of this trick is the ability to move bitmap graphics, since is contains ~9 times the data of a char screen. Linecrunching requires fairly exact timing since the tweak has to be triggered during a short period of the raster line. For crunching more lines, the tweak has to be repeated at the same position each raster line.
Here follows a small code example. Note that the $d021-indicator, that shows approx where the tweak is triggered, is not stable. It doesn't need to be 100% cycle exact, just fair enough. Also note the 7 pixel area with $3fff-pattern just below the linecrunch area. This happens because y-scroll was set to trigger the linecrunch, and when left untouched there are 7 lines until badline is triggered again. Set $d011 to something else just when exiting the loop and the $3fff can be avoided, or smooth scrolling can be obtained instead.. Note also what happens on the linecrunch area: the last line of graphics is repeated. There are no badlines, so no new char info is being fetched. If we switch to bitmap mode (yes, you can do this yourself), you will see that the graphics is actually being crunched, but the color info (which is represented by the chars) is being corrupt.
Binary: linecrunch.zip
sei lda #$aa ; Just to make 3fff visible sta $3fff lda #$17 ; Make letters like 'y','g','p' visible in the linecrunch area sta $d018 loop1 bit $d011 ; Wait for new frame bpl *-3 bit $d011 bmi *-3 lda #$1b ; Set y-scroll to normal position (because we fcuk it up later on..) sta $d011 jsr CalcNumLines ; Call sinus substitute routine lda #$51 ; Wait for position where we want LineCrunch to start cmp $d012 bne *-3 ldy #10 ; Wait one more line.. dey bne *-1 nop nop cmp $d012 ; ..and make a bit more stabel raster bne *+5 bit 0 nop ldx NumCrunchLines beq loop1 ; Skip if we want 0 crunched lines loop2 ldy #4 ; Wait some cycles dey bne *-1 ldy 0 lda $d012 ; Do one line of LineCrunch and #7 ora #$18 inc $d021 ; d021-indicator dec $d021 sta $d011 nop ; Wait some more cycles so that the whole loop ends up on 63 cycles (= one PAL raster line) nop nop nop dex ; Decrease counter beq loop1 ; Exit if we reached 0 jmp loop2 ; Otherwise loop CalcNumLines lda #0 bpl *+4 eor #$ff lsr lsr lsr sta NumCrunchLines inc CalcNumLines+1 rts NumCrunchLines .byte 0