| Game status buffer

80DD: Vertical guardians

The vertical guardian definitions are copied here by the routine at 8684, and then used by the routines at 8E75 and 8EF1. There are four slots, each one seven bytes long, used to hold the state of the vertical guardians in the current cavern. For each vertical guardian, the seven bytes are used as follows:
Byte | Contents
--- | ---
0 | Attribute
1 | Animation frame
2 | Pixel y-coordinate
3 | x-coordinate
4 | Pixel y-coordinate increment
5 | Minimum pixel y-coordinate
6 | Maximum pixel y-coordinate
In most of the caverns that do not have vertical guardians, this area is overwritten by unused bytes from the cavern definition. The exception is Eugene's Lair: the routine at 8684 copies the graphic data for the Eugene sprite into the last 32 bytes of this area, where it is then used by the routine at 8DF8.
80DD | DEFS $07 | Vertical guardian 1
80E4 | DEFS $07 | Vertical guardian 2
80EB | DEFS $07 | Vertical guardian 3
80F2 | DEFS $07 | Vertical guardian 4
80F9 | DEFB $00 | Terminator (set to 0xFF in caverns that have four vertical guardians)
80FA | DEFS $06 | Spare