Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: SCEE Developer Support Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.programming.2d_graphics Subject: Re: Yaroze - was I right to buy ? Date: Thu, 24 Apr 1997 09:32:52 +0100 Organization: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Lines: 61 Message-ID: <335F1AB4.3780@interactive.sony.com> References: <01bc5030$6f732280$2f19e8c3@cma> <335F39AE.16E8@dial.pipex.com> <01bc5086$cef47be0$02018484@chrisa> NNTP-Posting-Host: 194.203.13.10 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (Win95; I) Chris Allmark wrote: > > Chris Chadwick wrote in article > <335F39AE.16E8@dial.pipex.com>... > > > I don't know whether the full dev kit librarys have direct CD to frame > buffer > > functionality (Sony?) but I would guess that they don't and that > commercial > > games fall under the same restriction, in that respect. Having said that, > the > > PSX can stream FMV off CD into the frame buffer, but this probably goes > through > > the CD-ROM buffer memory first... > > I guess my main worry is that the effort I put into creating various > routines will be totally useless outside of the Yaroze environment - I've > seen various newsgroup postings about the differences between the full kit > and the cut down Yaroze (of which I was fully aware prior to my purchase), > but it would perhaps be nice to know EXACTLY what those differences are. > Maybe SONY could get some commercial developers to host a newsgroup > dedicated to this sort of info ? - I'm sure it's in the commercial > developers long term interest to reveal at least some of their development > secrets, as by the sounds of it from some of the newsgroup posings to date, > we already have a few *good* programmers on board. (don't get a big head > Alex) > > > You must be developing a game with a huge amount of sprites/frames per > sprite/ > > very large sprites! :-) I find the 1MB (minus double buffers) can hold > quite a > > sizable amount of sprites (especially if 4/8bit), and you could always > shift > > textures in and out of RAM/VRAM *quickly* using > LoadImage/MoveImage/StoreImage. > > (Sorry if I'm blathering on - it's just my oppinion...) > > ...err I think I might have been using them as 16 bit sprites (hence the > size) Whoops. > > BTW: Once I've loaded my sprites into VRAM can I free the memory they once > occupied (or is this done automatically ?). > > --- > Chris Allmark, Zoo Software Solutions > "If you can't plug it in - We don't use it !" There are no GPU related hardware restrictions with Yaroze compared to the normal dev kit. The main difference is that Yaroze contains the high level 3d/2d combined library libGs from the dev kit, and lacks the separate 2d libgpu and 3d maths libgte. All transfers to VRAM/SRAM occur via main ram and you can free the ram up after you have finished ( Maybe load texture data into your heap area and then transfer to VRAM before mallocing your data structures ) I'd always recommend using 4 bit textures, ( especially as you can adjust the colour/lighting ) as you get far better use of the texture cacheing in the GPU ( which can speed up things dramatically ) - Keep 16 bit for titles!! Colin.