SpritesMind.Net

Yes that may well work for testing RAM, but the problem here was the RAM is emulating ROM. Meaning your test program cannot actually write to this memory. So all tests would have to just fix some known data in ROM and perform some sort of checksum or other test or have a serious of such tests to try ...

I realize this topic is a bit old now but I thought I'd post what may be the conclusion to this issue. I found out from someone that deals in hardware like this that my DPF apparently has a regular 40pin Pro Fighter RAM board in it, not the Double Pro Fighter RAM board which is I think 50pins. So it ...

Any chance of someone cloning the VDP to make a pin for pin drop in replacement with enhanced features. Ex: Separate Color RAM for Sprites and Scroll Planes, or even 3 sets of 64 Color RAM entries with one for each of Sprites, Scroll A, and Scroll B. It would be amazing to see that assuming you ...

Of your possible reasons, it may be that many of those are true but different ones for different games/developers. We'll never know exactly why unless you catch someone on the development team of an old game that actually remembers things that went on about 2 decades ago.

What do you mean stick to modes available? And what do you mean "Mode" system for backgrounds? I don't think you understand what the "Mode" means.

The SNES PPU has drastically different behavior depending on which graphics mode is used. Mode 0 has 4 background layers that are all using 2bpp tiles ...

That document again seems to mention something to suggest per tile horizontal offset, which as I said before sounds useful and might be what Lightening Force uses.

That mention of "every row" which sounds to me like every 8x8 pixel unit, makes the use of the effect seem much less intense than every line. If this is the case, then I don't see using the effect nearly as costly on CPU time. But when you do every line, it seems you'll spend a considerable amount ...

Well, in hardware with HDMA the SNES can scroll every single line displayed to its own coordinates if you so choose to do so. I'm certain games have used this for special effects, possibly Chrono Trigger for battle spells or something like that. Final Fantasy 6 might do such a thing as well. It ...

Sheath, I took a look at a few of the examples you gave. Lightening Force, Batman, and MUSHA. I'm not convinced that the SNES is incapable of the different layer scrolling effects in some of these games. HDMA is very effective and as I recall was even in the GBA. You could probably pull off these ...

SNES had tile priority too. It wasn't somehow less capable than the MD.

If you are talking about background effects where in strips going left to right, different sections scroll at different rates, this is hardly something to brag about as even NES games did that. By that logic, Ninja Gaiden 3 in ...

Looks pretty cool and seems like a real shame they canceled it. Hopefully they'll manage to release it to the public domain somehow.

Gigasoft wrote:For example, in Mega Man 5, the debug key handler is a separate task.

What's this? Is there some code or patch to enable debug features in Mega Man 5? I've never heard of this and would like to know. =)

Regarding reprogramming - challenge is everything! :D
To have large, interesting levels, you also need to reprogram the maps quite frequently and fast, usually involving decompression of some sort. This is a challenge, especially if a game is a fast scroller.


If it doesn-t involve decompresion ...

I ended up buying the Neo Myth MD cartridge to replace my Double Pro Fighter. It's true it's expensive, but it's pretty nice otherwise. Chilly Willy's Menu allowing SD card loading of Genesis/32X roms is really awesome.

Chilly Willy, do you think in the future your menu will be able to support ...

I would guess you'd need to keep track of each NMI (frame rendered) and if your game engine was done calculating everything and got your video update in place in time, you'd mark that as a frame rendered and not missed. You could do this for groups of 60 frames, so you could see during various ...