Hi there, i got some questions ;)

Post by **pagefault** » Thu Apr 06, 2006 1:19 pm

Looking at the current state of the source things like that would be a challenge to do "properly" without changing the code around quite a bit. Such things aren't even in ZSNES yet for the same reason. Basic HDMA would not be hard to add but many games that use it would require it to have some functionality to be worthwhile.

mog123 · Post by **mog123** » Thu Apr 06, 2006 1:21 pm

now this is quite a request, but between the stuff you do/code, or when you'll have nothing to do/be bored
could you give it a shot?

Post by **pagefault** » Thu Apr 06, 2006 4:50 pm

Well I am not making any promises. I am just fixing what I can see off the top of my head that could be better. I really don't have any time to be implementing new things. Probably the best to expect is a bug fix or two. This project takes enough of my time as it is.

mog123 · Post by **mog123** » Thu Apr 06, 2006 4:52 pm

but anyway thanks:)
If you modify the source PM me the link or something so ill pass it to my Friend FluBBa

blackmyst · Post by **blackmyst** » Thu Apr 06, 2006 9:09 pm

Nightcrawler wrote:The Yoshi's Island port would probably have to emulate the SFX chip for full effects(if it doesn't emulate it to some degree already) because as nice as the GBA hardware is, it CAN'T do what the SFX chip was designed to do nor is it really powerful enough to fully emulate it at full speed in my opinion.

I don't really understand what you're saying, since like I mentioned, GBA Doom is way beyond anything the SFX2 chip could do (just compare the two Doom versions...) and we've all seen plenty of GBA games with effects that make Yoshi's Island look tame. So, to be honest I'm inclined to believe it was just a hastily assembled port. Not that it matters.

(edit: typo)

byuu · Post by **byuu** » Thu Apr 06, 2006 9:50 pm

FF5's text is on BG1 priority 0. This includes both the window and the text inside of it. Rather unusual, actually. If you have the window visible, I haven't a clue why the text isn't showing up. Probably something wrong with your CPU core. With 16 colors, it makes you wonder why they didn't at least add a shadow to the font in either the original or the fan translation.
I can see why making the text window translucent would be a pain, but a gradient fade would be child's play. Ah well.
Maybe once all the fan translations are done, a new era of SNES romhacking will emerge to go back and improve the original games + fan translations.

Nightcrawler · Post by **Nightcrawler** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 1:18 pm

blackmyst wrote:
Nightcrawler wrote:The Yoshi's Island port would probably have to emulate the SFX chip for full effects(if it doesn't emulate it to some degree already) because as nice as the GBA hardware is, it CAN'T do what the SFX chip was designed to do nor is it really powerful enough to fully emulate it at full speed in my opinion.
I don't really understand what you're saying, since like I mentioned, GBA Doom is way beyond anything the SFX2 chip could do (just compare the two Doom versions...) and we've all seen plenty of GBA games with effects that make Yoshi's Island look tame. So, to be honest I'm inclined to believe it was just a hastily assembled port. Not that it matters.

(edit: typo)

You're failing to recognize the difference between games naitively made for the GBA and ports from another system that relied on a coprocessor. Sure, the GBA Doom looks good and demonstrates some effects beyond that of the SNES. That's irrelevant to Yoshi's Island. That Doom port was naitively made for the GBA and didn't rely on coprocessors.

The SFX2 was designed for calculations that GBA hardware does NOT do. The code for Yoshi's Island relies on these calculations. Therefore, it MUST be done in software some way. Here's where the trickery comes in. They MAY have gone all out and tried to fully emulate the SF2 chip OR they would have had to do a pretty massive rewrite of the game engine.

Keep in mind, if they tried to emulate SF2, that chip runs at nearly 2/3 the GBA processors speed. There's no way they could do that full speed. GBA isn't powerful enough.

In the end, I can only speculate what really went on, but i have given you a plausable explanation for why Yoshi's Island taxes the crap out of the system.

blackmyst · Post by **blackmyst** » Fri Apr 07, 2006 1:50 pm

Ah, I guess I'm just expecting them to actually do that full rewrite, but I realise that's not something professional programmers really do, if they can get satisfying results through much more efficient means of porting.

gladius · Post by **gladius** » Sat Apr 08, 2006 5:59 am

Pagefault: I would be very interested in those bugfixes, if you sent me some mail with them I'd spin up a new build of snesds (snesadvance's big brother with sound emulation on the ds) as well.

I've been trying to work up the motivation to recode most of the ppu stuff to get hdma support in cleanly and work with the ds's significantly better resources but the lack of a debugger is a huge pain.

Unfortunately there is no CVS or anything like that, as there haven't really been multiple devs working on it at the same time.

mog123 · Post by **mog123** » Sat Apr 08, 2006 7:54 am

wait gladius till he's done, he'll send me the SNESAdvance source fixed, then i'll send it to you so you can implement it to SNESDS

Btw: SNESAdvance is the bigger btoher of SNESDS:) SNESDS is younger ;p

Post by **pagefault** » Sat Apr 08, 2006 9:19 pm

I will try to clean up my changes and send them sometime next week. They need testing first. They really aren't very big changes so don't be expecting pages of source changed. I only changed some things out of curiosity.

gladius · Post by **gladius** » Sat Apr 08, 2006 11:43 pm

Mog123: This isn't a competition between the two, I was planning on integrating the changes into snesadvance as well.

Pagefault: Small things perhaps, but they probably would have taken me forever to find I bet

. Anyhow, no pressure, I was just interested in seeing what you had done.

mog123 · Post by **mog123** » Sun Apr 09, 2006 9:31 am

yeah i know, just wanted to straighten up things gladius ;]
Hey glad, could you PM me your msn i would like to talk with you about 1 minor thing