Guys, please be realistic. 3D on Sam sucks.
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Aley
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Harte" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no>
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2008 3:35 PM
Subject: Attempts at 3d on the Sam?
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.
