OK, now I see that!D3thAdd3r wrote: ↑Tue Jan 30, 2018 3:28 amThere is an attract mode, where if you give no input at the title screen, it will play a solution to a random level. I had to keep these very short, as sprite blits crash into them otherwise. Primarily for an Uzebox sitting at a faire, expo, or electronics meet, to catch some attention. AE is not the best fit for JAMMA, but for that too I guess.
I see the memory activity related to playing the demo, it goes on at the upper end of the 0x0D00 bank, which seems to be the end of the RAM tiles. What looks odd to me is that there is a write activity on every screen change to this upper region (0x0C00 and 0x0D00 banks), even when swithing back to the Title screen, but there it is left unused then (only written).
It seems like you are still only accessing the SD card during transitions between screens (the demo data seems to be fully preloaded and then played from those RAM tiles). During this (at least with some care to avoid the sprite system doing stuff on a black screen where it is invisible anyway) you should be able to have the RAM tiles free, which should give enough space to load stuff.
You can use the SetSpriteVisibility() function, which is somewhat misnamed as in the reality (as it is even described there) it turns off sprite processing. So on a blank screen using this you can ensure that all your RAM tiles are left alone even without doing anything to make sure the screen itself is clear (since it is black by fading), allowing to use them to prepare for a level. (There is also a new SPRITE_OFF flag for toggling individual sprites, so you can also turn them off using this flag to free up the RAM tiles while maintaining a "clean'" VRAM).