Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Andrew Partington Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: negative scrolling on homebrew map routine - need help!! Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 11:40:20 +0100 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 64 Message-ID: <3AC06E14.DDF52035@harbinger.com> References: <3AAF7BB2.B427AED3@harbinger.com> <98o38v$ij81@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <98p3qp$rms2@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <98t840$6f5@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <99057g$3ok7@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <3AB6404F.65C9AF1C@harbinger.com> <9961fn$7jl4@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <99624q$7jl5@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <9963bb$7jl6@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <997j6l$7jl8@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <3AB774C7.6B4D8F95@harbinger.com> <998bjc$7jl11@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <3AB8A751.A5D36CCF@harbinger.com> <3AB8DFBA.7BDE2A4E@harbinger.com> <99b11c$cia1@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <99e5uf$mp51@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <99fb8j$mp52@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <99lnvq$roa1@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <99m4ju$roa2@www.netyaroze-europe.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: manuk63.harbinger.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (WinNT; I) X-Accept-Language: en Hi everyone! I had a moment of inspiration last night while playing Bangai-o :) (level 19 boss to be exact) I think I might have sussed out another way of improving the performance of this routine, without having to learn about TMD manipulation beforehand [even though I thought I was going to have to go down that route and waste another year :)] - using the much overlooked (by me anyway) MoveImage()! Basically, I intend to MoveImage() my blocks directly from VRAM into another VRAM area, then have between 80-20 sprites (depending on colour depth) in an array making up the background which use this other VRAM area to grab their textures from. Obviously this means I can't store as many textures as I could before, but I consider this an acceptable tradeoff. (VRAM buffer size is also dependant on colour depth). Surely I can display 80 sprites at very maximum (more likely to be 40 though, coz i'm going back to 8-bit backgrounds!) for a background without killing performance too much! Another advantage (besides the speed of moving stuff in VRAM) is that its no longer dependant on the way I want to draw the map - I can use sprites, or when I get less scared of dynamic TMD maybe I can use it as a texture :) Disadvantage - I lose per-block lighting (using sprites anyway) :( Which, to be honest, might have looked a bit ropey anyway, given the resolution of 16*16 or 32*32 blocks... (might have been nice with 8*8 tho!) That'll teach me for doing it the brute force way and not taking the PSX architecture into account! [Wonder if that's why the X-Box is coming out ;)] And [another moment of inspiration reading Matthew Smith's homepage, and reminicing about the good old Speccy - though I hesitate to mention it because I may get burned at the stake by Sony, but still... :)] Has anyone investigated the possibility of burning data onto CDR as audio, then writing a Yaroze loader to read CDDA into the audio buffer, decode it and store it into the relevant place in memory? (something similar must get done with the sound-light programs that are floating about) Obviously you wouldn't be able to boot from CD, but you could put the CDR in after uploading the code via normal means, and you'd have to have the Yaroze turn the volume down on the sound channels before you did this or suffer from blown speakers :) I'd try it but I doubt they'd be too happy at work if I kept coming up to them asking to burn some tims for me! Or is CDDA too imprecise for data transfer - I saw some TV programme once where they were showing something about music piracy, and they took this copied CD and the original round to some blokes house who had magic ears, and he could tell them apart pretty much straight away (this was a supposedly good copy as well)! I thought about doing something similar with the memory cards once, to see if it was possible to cram a Yaroze game into an 8K memory card block, and have a memory card loader running on Yaroze. I never got round to it though [work got in the way :( ] That might have been cool - an 8K games competition, and 15 games/memory card - minus siocons baud rate info of course :) I get first call on doing Combat though :) [which is what this game actually started as, before I started adding stuff to it, hence the design of the ship :) I've got this quality aerial view of Washington showing the Pentagon, which would be excellent for the jet games! I've also got some satellite pics of Area 51 (in black+white though) which might be pretty cool] Cheers everyone for their input, it's really been appreciated! It's good to know that people still read the newsgroups and are ready to help out! Andy