I'm coming close to completing my first big project (yay!), and I need some advice. I'm getting ready to do some optimizations, but since I'm not intimately familiar with ASM, I don't really know what to do. I only vaguely remember a couple of things that were mentioned on the TICT forum. So, here are my questions:

Right now, I have all my variables as local variables in _main(). I'm considering moving them to be global so that I don't have to pass so much to my functions. Which is better in terms of speed? Which is better in terms of size?

Also, in several cases, I pass a structure (of roughly 22 bytes) to several functions. Would it be better to pass it as a pointer?

Finally, I'm assuming declaring functions called only once as "static inline" has no drawbacks. Is this so?

Thanks!
~d

P. S. I'm also thinking of slowing down the game in the early levels so that it appears to work at the same speed on all levels. I remember something about one of the ports associated with the programmable timer not working on VTI. (Since I don't have any way of transferring to my calculator, all my testing is done on VTI.) What parts of the programmable timer can I expect to work?