Mixing variable types in a numerical calculation

[boriel]

Don't worry - no offence taken  I guess it's because my game programming experience is limited to BASIC, so I never really investigated typical solutions for collision detection once the horrific performance constraints are removed.

My understanding is that I could define the whole playfield as an array of characters full of 0s, with the castle positions as 1s. Then at each trajectory PLOT I would have to convert the PLOT coords to PRINT coords and looks up against the array. I think that PLOT->PRINT coord conversion is already fairly expensive, and I'm fairly convinced that the whole approach would perform worse that simply reading two UINTEGERS and comparing with a ULONG as I am now doing.

As a clarification, I'm only interested in optimal performance for the actual ballistic trajectory loop (with collision detection) - which is fundamentally important to how smooth this game runs. I'm not chasing byte-optimal methods everywhere else, but I do appreciate being steered towards to more 'correct' way to achieve certain tasks. There is no greater authority than the man who wrote the compiler 

Haha, thanks for the compliment. But people (like you in this case) have helped a lot finding bugs, proposing features, and sometimes even ASM code snippets, advice, code, etc...
Please, post any update on this. I'm very interested in seeing the results.