Sound! I am still musicless, but never fear, for sound effects will fill the gap. Screenshots are pretty poor for sound [wink], so here's the <a href="./firetrack_sound.mp3">MP3</a>.
Simple as it sounds, that takes a mere 163 lines of ASM code to work, and even then it's a fairly crap effect!
Each sound is stored as a series of "fades". Each fade contains the following data:
<ul><li>Starting period of the wave.</li><li>Starting amplitude of the wave.</li><li>Length of the wave in frames.</li><li>Amount to add to volume each frame.</li><li>Amount to add to period each frame.</li></ul>
Using these simple fades and joining them together you can very easily produce a fairly complex sound. There are currently only two sound effects, and both are a single "fade" long - one for firing, the other for when a tile on the ground has been hit.
Each sound effect is issued with a priority, in a little table, so that the most important sound is played over the top of the least important one. In this case, if you play a more important one over a less important one (higher pitched bleeps) it cuts the less important one out for good - which is rubbish, really. What I will have to do is to extend the system to act over a list of current sound effects that can be added to at any time. That way, which tone is sent to the PSG (the sound chip) can be decided at that point, based on priority (and maybe volume, I'll have to see how it sounds).

I fixed Latenite's ugly XP icon issue, and here are the results:

<img src="./latenite_debug.png" /> <img src="./latenite_release.png" />

[sad] The one on the left is the Debug build. The one on the right is the Release build. I have no idea why it is doing that on the right, or how I can fix it.

It gets better.

<img src="./latenite_release_in_ide.png" />

This is what it looks like in Release mode when running in the VS.NET IDE.
I shall now resist the urge to make an massive journal post this time. Honest. Just watch me.