Track the active character with the battle name highlight - #35
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manz merged 1 commit intoSep 10, 2026
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Two defects, both measured against a Palom / Cecil / Porom party. The walk read which character a row shows out of CharOrderTbl and wrote a tilemap row per display index. Neither holds. `DrawCharNames` ($02:A20C) takes both from `$02:A1CD`, the table of battle-struct pointers it indexes by display position: a first byte of zero is the empty slot it skips, and it skips without taking a row, so the names compact upward. The order table disagrees with those pointers - it calls display 0 slot 1 while the pointer reads $2080, slot 2 - which is what lit the wrong name. Slot now comes from the pointer, (base - $2000) / $40, and rows count only the names actually drawn. It also ran from the writer shim, at the instant the engine stores $1822. That is too early to ask what is on screen, and it never came back to check: measured there, four of five slots report hidden, while the same bytes read clear once the battle is running. The shim now just invalidates a key and a per-frame refresh re-applies when the active character or the drawn-name set moves - a compare on an idle frame, still a ~300-cycle palette flip when it fires, never a re-render. Verified by forcing $1822 and reading the ink colour off the framebuffer: Cecil highlights Cecil's row, Palom highlights Palom's.
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Stacked on #34.
The highlight is a tilemap palette flip — ~300 cycles, not a re-render — and it stopped following the active character. Two defects, both measured on a Palom / Cecil / Porom party.
Wrong source for row to character. It read the slot from
CharOrderTbland wrote one tilemap row per display index.DrawCharNames($02:A20C) uses neither: both come from$02:A1CD, the table of battle-struct pointers it indexes by display position. A first byte of zero is the empty slot it skips, and it skips without taking a row, so names compact upward. The two tables disagree — the order table calls display 0 slot 1 while its pointer reads $2080, slot 2 — which is what lit the wrong name.Applied before the engine was ready. It ran once from the writer shim at the
sta $1822instant and never revisited. Measured there, four of five slots report hidden; the same bytes read clear once the battle runs. The shim now invalidates a key and a per-frame refresh re-applies whenever the active character or the drawn-name set moves: a compare on an idle frame, the flip when it fires. Self-healing, so it cannot get wedged on stale state again.Verified by forcing
$1822and reading ink colour off the framebuffer: Cecil highlights Cecil's row, Palom highlights Palom's. A natural ATB rotation could not be driven in either savestate I have — one has Cecil at agility 55 against 8, so the queue only ever holds him.