Super Famicast or Dreamsnes Quick Question

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Wed Oct 20, 2004 4:08 pm

I appreciate the thought but you're better off keeping your money. For some reason I don't feel comfortable accepting donations anymore. I haven't got a donation in a long time anyways. I put that donation page up when I was struggling financially. I'm little bit more comfortable now.

The graphics rendering is the biggest sucker of clock cycles in Super Famicast. It's rather complex in it's current state. It renders to a buffer then that's copied to the screen, basically. I'm going to attempt to copy only the individual tile data up as seperate PVR textures, then render them using the PVR square by square. This will enable me to do harware accelerated effects on backgrounds and sprites such as punch throughs, transparencies, rotation, and scaling. It will also greatly reduce the amount of data sent to PVR memory. All the data that is needed to do it is there in the SNES's BG and OAM memory. I just have to figure out how to do it while still maintaining a final image that is close to a real SNES. Since it will use the PVR hardware as a tile based kind of engine with bilinear filtering applied on a tile-by-tile basis, it won't be EXACTLY true to a real SNES. But it should be considerably faster.

This is my plan.

Clessy · Post by **Clessy** » Wed Oct 20, 2004 6:00 pm

This is a totally a shock from the last time you talked about Superfamicast.....
What I said was true on the other page untill now. I mean I couldnt of predicted he'd read the topic and be inspired to work on it again.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Wed Oct 20, 2004 9:26 pm

Yeah, what you said was true then. I got inspired a couple of days ago. How can I live with myself with this huge failure haunting me. I mean, yeah, I gave hope by starting a new SNES emu almost a year ago but it's promise was to replace DreamSNES as the SNES emu of choice on DC. I get frustrated and stuck. I need to step back to contrive new ideas.

Clessy · Post by **Clessy** » Wed Oct 20, 2004 10:02 pm

I know I use to talk to you about superfamicast all the time. I'm glad you've started working on it again. It only needs a little bit of speed to be better than DreamSnes is thats all your trying. I just dont ever see you wanting to code for the love and passion of it. I just hope you're not doing this for the presure of knowing you didnt finsh something. You dont owe anyone anything do it for youself it you want too. Don't neglect the important things to focus on a emulator. Its all about prorities.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 7:25 am

Oh I definitely have a passion for being creative. I'm always thinking of new projects to fulfill my need to create. And when I start these projects, I set goals. I started Super Famicast because I tired of waiting for a new release of DreamSNES. And I see the progress of SNES emulation on clearly less powerful systems like Gameboy Advance and GP32, and I can't believe for a moment that fullspeed SNES emulation on DC isn't obtainable.

Clessy · Post by **Clessy** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 12:03 pm

If you want more people to use SuperFamicast it would be nice to add DreamSnes save game loading for Superfamicast. It's the only reasons I use DreamSnes over SuperFamicast. Wouldnt want my ff6 or Chrono trigger data that have about 30 hrs of gameplay on them to be wasted.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 12:09 pm

That's certainly doable, I think. The save file should be the save format.

Clessy · Post by **Clessy** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 2:22 pm

Yes I agree it should just be the format. No point in both emulators using there own format. It would be nice to see you online some more scher. I know you're busy but it's nice talking to you every once in awhile.

Johnnylee_hang · Post by **Johnnylee_hang** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 8:41 pm

Hey Scherzo, I'm counting on you. I'm taking Visual Basic .NET right now. Then my next course will be C++. Hopefully, I will help you develope more when I'm up to that class. I dreamed of becoming dreamcast geekie even perhap a master of it.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 10:13 pm

That's great, man! You can be a master is you really want to. Go for it. A little bit of advice though. Don't wait around for the next course to get into C++. Get a head start. Experiment. The only class I took for programming was QBASIC. Everything else has been self taught; books, tutorials, and just playing around with stuff. To me, school is more of a means of proving to people that you can work hard, and not so much a place for learning real world stuff.

spiroth10 · Post by **spiroth10** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 1:02 pm

yes... sherzo's right...

Im 14, in a poor school, so I CANT take classes...

I learned all the C/C++ I know from library books...

Im not as good as sherzo, but I am definitely not the worst coder ever... I just keep getting bored with my projects once Ive goten them going...

like my text based RPG... I had the engine totally done... just didnt feel like finishing it... no one ever saw its (new) source code, after I totally re-programmed it.

what you learn in school doesnt help much anyway, because you end up using custom libraries (NECESSARY FOR THE DC) that you'll never learn about in class...

Mikey242 · Post by **Mikey242** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 6:30 pm

Nice to hear your going to resume work on superfamicast. Im sure that will make a lot of people happy (no obligations though, dont forget

).

Scherzo wrote:....I'm going to attempt to copy only the individual tile data up as seperate PVR textures, then render them using the PVR square by square. This will enable me to do harware accelerated effects on backgrounds and sprites such as punch throughs, transparencies, rotation, and scaling....

If not already, wont this allow you to emulate mode7 effects? I cant remember but if you already can, how could it be done using the current render method? (sorry if im n00bing lol).

Good luck Scherzo

Johnnylee_hang · Post by **Johnnylee_hang** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 8:44 pm

So, Tell me how to get ahead. I want to know! Which program should I need to start any project myself?

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 2:07 pm

Mikey242 wrote:If not already, wont this allow you to emulate mode7 effects? I cant remember but if you already can, how could it be done using the current render method? (sorry if im n00bing lol).

Yes, mode7 stuff should be faster through this method too.

I hope I can make this work.

Clessy · Post by **Clessy** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 5:03 pm

I just hope that I can use my DreamSnes Chrono Trigger save on SuperFamicast next version. Also isnt there absolutly no point of using DreamSnes's Sh4 core since it doesnt offer that much speed and it takes away from you're creablity in trying to create a better snes emu when your main core is based of DreamSnes. Plus it just complecates things since you dont know SH4 well enough to edit around with it.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 6:28 pm

Shjt, I don't care too much about credit. All I ever wanted was a fullspeed SNES emu. That's why I started this project. If someone released a perfect SNES emu for DC tomorrow, I would be estatic. I mean, think about it. The nearly the entire friggin' emu is someone else's work. It's a port of snes9x. I'm just trying to be the guy in the middle here. Taking whatever from wherever to make this happen and gluing it all together.

Clessy · Post by **Clessy** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 7:58 pm

I just don't think the core adds enough speed and its hard to work with. It's not worth the hassle at the moment. Like I said I just want the next version to load dreamsnes saves.

Ex-Cyber · Post by **Ex-Cyber** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 10:54 pm

scherzo: have you done any profiling on Super Famicast? If so what is the rough breakdown of how many cycles are being taken by CPU, graphics, APU, sound synthesis, etc?

megaman8x · Post by **megaman8x** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 2:09 am

why do you want it so realistic to the snes, why not do what bleemcast did, emulate and improve at the same time

Clessy · Post by **Clessy** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 5:40 am

Theres nothing to really enhance. All you'd be able to do it add screen interpolation.