New texture mapping possibilities for SEGA Saturn

[Christuserloeser]

Rockin-B released a demo for SEGA Saturn introducing his new real-time texture mapping support library allowing a way to change the texture coordinates:

The SEGA Saturn cannot change texture coordinates in game by hardware. This means that textures are pre-mapped and cannot change [...] which is required for some of todays lightning effects. So I started to implement the generation of a texture from a big source texture using texture coordinates and expanded it to a full featured real-time texture mapping support library. Three demos were released and the 3rd new demo is really.....ahm.....really worth to look at, I think.

He provided an AVI recorded via Satourne that gives you at least an impression how the demo will look like if played on real hardware. Download the AVI here (http://www.rockin-b.de/saturn/TextureCoordinates/TC_demo3_tim.avi)

[The AVI] does NOT look like on real Saturn, due to compression and bugs of the Satourne emulator, like black lines between polygons and triangle distortion of quads.

More info, screenshots & download(s) at http://www.rockin-b.de/

[Meshuggah27]

Nice man O_O!

Too bad this guy doesnt know how to use fraps and then compress the video into .wmv with windows movie maker. lmao

[RockinB]

Nice man O_O!

Too bad this guy doesnt know how to use fraps and then compress the video into .wmv with windows movie maker. lmao

I've used fraps several years ago and afair it's screen recording feature wasn't available for free at that time. Anyway, I didn't record it myself, because I can't. Timothy made it and I applied MPEG 4 compression with ffmpegX (mencoder). Could you please tell me why one should use wmf format instead?

Anyone who wants to capture a video from a Saturn emulator or real hardware is welcome :) .

[Darksaviour69]

here is a open source video capture program

http://sourceforge.net/projects/camstudio/

[RockinB]

here is a open source video capture program

http://sourceforge.net/projects/camstudio/

That's nice, but as I said, I can't capture myself (my GFX card is too instable).

[Christuserloeser]

RockinB, maybe you should try to get in contact with BlueCrab. He's working on Yabause-DC, the Dreamcast port of Yabause: http://yabause.sourceforge.net/
I guess with your fantastic Saturn knowledge you could be a great help for him - if you're interested in helping out and got the time needed that is.

[RockinB]

The texture mapping stuff is usefull for sprite based systems in general.
This includes consoles which don't have a 3D GPU, but display polygons as distorted sprites like SEGA CD, Saturn, maybe GP32, 32x and others.

Currently some texture mapping parts use Saturn specific libs, but these are to be replaced while optimizing nevertheless. So when development goes on, it could be that we see it on other platforms, too.



RockinB, maybe you should try to get in contact with BlueCrab. He's working on Yabause-DC, the Dreamcast port of Yabause: http://yabause.sourceforge.net/
I guess with your fantastic Saturn knowledge you could be a great help for him - if you're interested in helping out and got the time needed that is.

Usually authors of emulators help each other. But even they do not know each detail, neither do I. When it comes to Saturn software, I'm your man ;) .
The secret to Saturn development is just:
After finding out
"Wow, this hardware is so complex, noone can ever understand it."
to get to know better
1. "I don't need to understand all."
2. "I've been wrong, one can indeed handle the whole machine."

[RockinB]

Wow, great news:
morden made a video and screenshots from real Saturn hardware!

The video is great with background music added!
TC_demo3_morden.avi (http://www.rockin-b.de/saturn/TextureCoordinates/TC_demo3_morden.avi)

And some screenshots:
http://www.rockin-b.de/saturn/TextureCoordinates/morden_01.jpg
http://www.rockin-b.de/saturn/TextureCoordinates/morden_02.jpg
http://www.rockin-b.de/saturn/TextureCoordinates/morden_03.jpg
http://www.rockin-b.de/saturn/TextureCoordinates/morden_05.jpg
http://www.rockin-b.de/saturn/TextureCoordinates/morden_06.jpg

Thanks a lot to morden.

And I invite everyone who is interested to record his own video or screenshots!

[AKB]

those are some pretty big pictures? and some pretty cool ones