Memory use

The ZXodus][Engine is designed around the hardware limitations of the ZX Spectrum +2B. The RAM is divided into eight banks of 16K. Half of those banks (the last four) have shared access with the video ASIC and suffer additional timing delays. Also, most of the banks are available only in the top 16K of the Z80’s 64K address space. Because the display routine is timing intensive, compression is only used for infrequently accessed data.

The address space contains the following banks:

C000-FFFF: any
8000-BFFF: bank 2
4000-7FFF: bank 5
0000-3FFF: ROM

The RAM is used as follows:

bank 0: 2D tiles
bank 1: 3D tiles
bank 2: executable (game logic)
bank 3: dungeon maps + compressed music
bank 4: world map
bank 5: frame buffer + font + temporary work space
bank 6: compressed town maps + encounter maps
bank 7: compressed text + dialog trees

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