Though I did spend much time thinking about this, my idea was not correct.
The "tearing" and "previous frame is being shown while it is being drawn" is
simply because that's exactly what the logic in holly/core.cpp did.
This is no longer the case--by the time the newly-created core_flip function is
called, the core render is complete, and we should switch the FB_R_SOF1 to the
current framebuffer, not the one that is going to be written on next frame.
This also modifies alt.lds so that (non-startup) code now runs in the P1 area,
with operand/instruction/copyback caches enabled. This caused a 10x speed
increase in my testing.
There are still texture sampling issues that I don't understand. Until
I properly understand this, using (bitmap) fonts that have
power-of-two dimensions seem to produce "acceptable but incorrect"
results.
This fully threads both the real minimum size of the texture and the
dimensions of the texture through to the TA parameters.
This also removes spurious zero-area drawing commands (space
characters).
This still needs to be cleaned up, particularly to properly pass the
texture size around--there are a few unnecessary '128x256' magic
numbers scattered in the code.