hi guys

I'm been coding a sonic the hedgehog style platformer game for the last 3 months. The game is fairly processor intensive but not so much from the graphics point of veiw (it uses a bitmap scrolling engine which seems to be pretty good). The game runs about 50fps, but drops to 17fps in about 1 frame in every 5, I've found it does this even when the graphics have been disabled. I've always had it at the back of my mind to port this into as3 to benefit from the better preformance, I've so far come into a few problems so far. I've been trying to port it using the flash 9 alpha as3 preview, but this has no "check syntax" function, I've used this about for catching 90% of my mistakes and 10% or so would be caught at compiling time. It would be a huge burden on me if I needed to use the compiler output window to find out if my code is working or not. Are there any ways to get around this problem in flash9 alpha?

I've also been looking at flex 2. Flex 2 is out now, but although it's not beta anymore I can't seem to find any equivalent to the "check syntax" button for coding as3. I'm certainly not familiar with flex either however, so mabey there are different technuiqes for coding besides a "check sytax" button? If any of yous have any experience with flex please tell if theres anything else I should be doing.

thanks for reading :]