Thomas Harte
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 06:42:25 -0700
Hi,I've just discovered pyz80 and am having a fresh bash at some Sam projects. As I'm simultaneously working on a Freescape interpreter for the PC, my thoughts have inevitably turned to 3d on the Sam, even if it means a Freescape-style non-realtime display. I'm therefore curious about lots of things, and have a multitude of questions:
— besides Stratosphere, the F16 demo and that brief gameover bit in Dyzonium, are there any other playable segments of games that demonstrate 3d graphics? I know there are some demos with bits of 3d graphics, but I figure that spending 256 kb on getting the fastest possible rotating cube isn't a helpful guide.
— has it been established whether the animated gifs of Chrome featured on http://www.samcoupe.com/preview.htm represents the speed at which the game would play on a real, unexpanded Sam?
— is there any speed advantage to using the ROM routines such as JDRAW, JPUT and/or JBLITZ? I appreciate that they are more general case than routines that it makes sense to write for a game, but as I understand it the ROM is uncontended?
To be honest, I can imagine that something like Chrome could be done with a live update since most of the display doesn't change between most frames (it's just a bunch of vertical strips of colour that quite often change height and occasionally change colour), and the algorithms that are commonly used to calculate scenes such as that in Chrome make it really cheap to calculate out a minimal list of the required changes.