SpritesMind.Net

Take a look at my research posts about drawing sprites. There are routines that draws 32x32 sprites in various ways. It may give you some ideas. But realistically chances are you’ll have to settle for a low framerate or draw just the important objects. The 32x doesn’t give you enough pixel throughpu...

You might be interested in this topic I just started.

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3237

Intro I'm releasing this before feature creep makes me go crazy. Following my Afterburner/Space Harrier 32x investigations, (http://gendev.spritesmind.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3234) I wanted to use the knowledge I gained to start writing my own routines using different techniques and to setup ...

So it looks like Space Harrier and Afterburner are each taking opposite trade-offs. Space Harrier is high-quality scaling, low object count and Afterburner is low-quality scaling, high object count.

Yeah, I think I know what Afterburner is doing for odd addresses: it completely avoids writing to them. Looking at individual frames of the intro swirling balls animation, there never seems to be a one pixel space. Every time there is space between spheres, it's always a multiple two pixels. And fol...

Looking at Afterburner's ram again. Even in it's frozen state I've found two pairs of smoke sprites. They're basically identical except one side's empty space is different. I don't think my hypothesis of the game storing two sets of sprites with one set stored offset by one column is panning out. ht...

Figured out how to properly view Shadow Squadron's VRAM dump. False color (pixels are actually 8bit palette indexes but here interpreted as RGB8) image of Shadow Squadron video ram dump. Orange border is actually black in-game, showing how the game is rendered smaller than 320x224. The top part is f...

I've managed to prove that Space Harrier uses the Fill function to clear the top part of the screen and to fill the bottom of the ground. I've also looked at Shadow Squadron and it uses the Fill function to draw polygon rows, and drawing single pixels for odd addresses, just as expected. The weird t...

Here's a video of one frame of Space Harrier being drawn, pixel by pixel. You'll notice that it starts from the horizon and the jump when it finishes drawing the bottom of the grid. These are the parts where I think maybe the game is using the FILL function or DMA somehow. https://www.dropbox.com/s/...

After failing to be able to get any kind of decent performance out of my attempts at a super-scalar type engine, I decided to investigate what Space Harrier and Afterburner do to get their very reasonable 30fps performance. This is where I'll put my findings. I originally wanted to focus on Afterbur...

WIth my 32x experiments, these are definitely related to my interests! It's great!

In my current 32x experiments, I'm using FILL (multiple times) to clear the background before drawing sprites. Are there any known issues to this?

Alternatively, do you know of faster methods of clearing the framebuffer?

pouring through the docs again: "Frame buffer can be switched only in VBlank. During display, even when writing to the FS bit, the buffer does not switch until VBlank occurs; " It says DRAM can be accessed after confirming the FS bit (from the Frame Buffer Control Register, which indicates which fra...

Hi there, I've got a basic 32x app loop running like while (1) { // input // draw Hw32xScreenFlip(1); // 1 is for wait } where Hw32xScreenFlip void Hw32xScreenFlip(int wait) { // Flip the framebuffer selection bit MARS_VDP_FBCTL = currentFB ^ 1; if (wait) { while ((MARS_VDP_FBCTL & MARS_VDP_FS) == c...

Wow! Thanks! I'm glad I had a part in encouraging you to start!