Search found 2985 matches

by Chilly Willy
Mon Jan 16, 2023 8:09 pm
Forum: Super 32X
Topic: All sound options explained?
Replies: 7
Views: 18822

Re: All sound options explained?

1) What IS DMA, PCM, VGM, CD Audio, and MOD options I keep reading about? I'm assuming that these are not all separate options but part of options used. I guess I don't quiet understand these except with CD audio...i know what that is, but have no clue on how to best implement that within 32x game ...
by Chilly Willy
Sun Jan 15, 2023 10:25 pm
Forum: SGDK
Topic: TileSet internal data
Replies: 43
Views: 69530

Re: TileSet internal data

That it pretty cool. It's a good start, at least.
by Chilly Willy
Sun Jan 15, 2023 10:22 pm
Forum: Tools
Topic: sixpack handling of palettes for multiple images?
Replies: 23
Views: 14496

Re: sixpack handling of palettes for multiple images?

That sounds okay, but I usually just strip the palette straight from the BMP header with a hex-editor. You can also strip the headers from BMP files leaving just the data with a hex-editor. But if you get that other tool to work, that may be easier for some. Another suggestion - if you need to mess ...
by Chilly Willy
Fri Jan 13, 2023 10:22 pm
Forum: Tools
Topic: sixpack handling of palettes for multiple images?
Replies: 23
Views: 14496

Re: sixpack handling of palettes for multiple images?

Okay, probably the key thing to converting things to 256 colors and splitting them up correctly... use GIMP. :lol: I'm not certain where you're having trouble with asesprite, but GIMP never gives me any trouble. Use a hex editor to double check the header your version of GIMP is saving. Even being o...
by Chilly Willy
Thu Jan 12, 2023 9:57 am
Forum: Tools
Topic: sixpack handling of palettes for multiple images?
Replies: 23
Views: 14496

Re: sixpack handling of palettes for multiple images?

Each time you quantize, it generates new colors. When you quantize for 256 colors, you're done if the images are for the 32X. There's no need to further quantize to fewer colors since everything is in the image when quantized to 256 colors. When you chop the big image up, you do nothing other than c...
by Chilly Willy
Wed Jan 11, 2023 10:39 pm
Forum: Tools
Topic: sixpack handling of palettes for multiple images?
Replies: 23
Views: 14496

Re: sixpack handling of palettes for multiple images?

Chop them up before compiling the rom. That way they use the least amount of space. When you combine all the images together into one, it's unlikely that it will all fit together into a nice rectangle. I tend to have gaps and parts sticking out this way and that... so I just chop them up into indivi...
by Chilly Willy
Mon Jan 09, 2023 3:14 pm
Forum: Tools
Topic: My current Sega MD/CD/32X devkit
Replies: 7
Views: 16696

Re: My current Sega MD/CD/32X devkit

I don't remember about the 9.x version, but the 12.1.0 version was built without gmp, mpc, or mpfr... why? My system didn't need them, so I thought that gcc removed those from the build dependencies. Apparently, this is not the case for some people. The way to fix that is to get the archives for the...
by Chilly Willy
Mon Jan 09, 2023 3:03 pm
Forum: Tools
Topic: sixpack handling of palettes for multiple images?
Replies: 23
Views: 14496

Re: sixpack handling of palettes for multiple images?

palref wants a palette file, not an image. It has the same format as the generated savepal file. For the first image, you want to not use palref so that it only uses the colors in the image, and save that palette using savepal. For the other images, you then load that palette file with palref, and s...
by Chilly Willy
Mon Dec 26, 2022 2:52 pm
Forum: Video Display Processor
Topic: Capabilities of various VDPs at parallax effects
Replies: 35
Views: 129780

Re: Capabilities of various VDPs at parallax effects

Yeah, I saw your PC Engine examples, and they look truly amazing. Far beyond anything I've seen on Genesis, and, so far, much nicer than anything I've seen the SNES dev scene put out too, which is bonkers. The single biggest problem with the Genesis display is the small palette. 3 bits per gun (BGR...
by Chilly Willy
Sun Dec 25, 2022 1:58 pm
Forum: Video Display Processor
Topic: Capabilities of various VDPs at parallax effects
Replies: 35
Views: 129780

Re: Capabilities of various VDPs at parallax effects

Is there no "other" section on the forums? Oh well, shameless plug for my "hi color demo"... a wip demonstration, for PCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjYw55qn8Rw That's really good looking. Rendered games like Nintendo did for the SNES late in its life would do well with that sort of coloring.
by Chilly Willy
Fri Dec 16, 2022 9:52 pm
Forum: Video Display Processor
Topic: Capabilities of various VDPs at parallax effects
Replies: 35
Views: 129780

Re: Capabilities of various VDPs at parallax effects

I'm still regularly impressed with how great a job the little PC Engine does so much of the time, especially in overcoming the single background layer limitation to create some lovely parallax and the like. Yeah, they did a great job on many of the games. They learned to eek every little bit out of...
by Chilly Willy
Thu Dec 15, 2022 10:47 pm
Forum: Video Display Processor
Topic: Man, Blast Processing is not what I thought it was. . . .
Replies: 5
Views: 10821

Re: Man, Blast Processing is not what I thought it was. . . .

Blast Processing, the way Sega pushed in ads, was just marketing hype. The joke among programmers was to point to a chip on the PCB and tell folks "that's the Blast Processor." :lol: The "blast processing" done by programmers of the time was to make use of raster timed interrupts to initiate DMA ope...
by Chilly Willy
Thu Dec 15, 2022 10:15 pm
Forum: Video Display Processor
Topic: Capabilities of various VDPs at parallax effects
Replies: 35
Views: 129780

Re: Capabilities of various VDPs at parallax effects

You can't compare clock rates directly. While the Genesis has a faster clock rate, it take multiple cycles to do instructions. The quickest instructions take four cycles, and you can quickly run over a dozen cycles by working on longs and using certain addressing modes. In contrast, the 6502/65816 t...
by Chilly Willy
Thu Dec 15, 2022 10:01 pm
Forum: Megadrive/Genesis
Topic: Regarding the 480i mode on Genesis. . . .
Replies: 23
Views: 197483

Re: Regarding the 480i mode on Genesis. . . .

Sonic uses double resolution for two-player so that each half-screen is the standard Sonic resolution. This means all art assets are used as-is. There's no room for other assets to make two-player look not squished. This means two-player looks squished, but the Sonic Team felt that was preferable to...
by Chilly Willy
Sun Dec 11, 2022 4:17 pm
Forum: Video Display Processor
Topic: Capabilities of various VDPs at parallax effects
Replies: 35
Views: 129780

Re: Capabilities of various VDPs at parallax effects

Those "benchmark" videos just demonstrate that while the person knows how to program, he knows very little about hardware. Understanding the processors and related chips at a hardware level is necessary to get the most out of a system. Many games don't need the most, so you don't need to understand ...