wraggster
August 17th, 2005, 23:49
The DS Heretic Site (http://heretic.drunkencoders.com/) have posted some WIP news concerning their port of Heretic to the Nintendo DS, heres the scoop:
August 15, 2005 -- Made some speed enhancements.
When I orginally worked the drawing routines out, I made a temporary space in VRAM to hold the new frame that I was drawing. I was then going to flip it in like a back buffer flipping to the front. You incur a large speed hit writing directly to VRAM when you can not write two pixels at a time, because VRAM can not be accessed as 16-bit (I had to do a read-modify-write). Then, I never worked on getting the page to flip in, I did a VRAM to VRAM dma. I moved the frame buffer into EWRAM and it is much faster now.
August 14, 2005 -- Got sound working!
I finally found what was not working and got the project building with Release 15. I do not understand it,but I had a character array, char name8[9]. To make string compare easy, I turned it into and int, like this: int v1 = *(int *)name8 (the first four characters anyway). This was working with Release 13, but not Release 15. I am using playGenericSound to play the sounds. I do not understand how to use playSound yet.
I also have the save game working fully now (this took a long time too, I had an odd inventory bug), and menu options save to the SRAM so you lefties do not have to select "Left Handed" every time you turn it on.
August 15, 2005 -- Made some speed enhancements.
When I orginally worked the drawing routines out, I made a temporary space in VRAM to hold the new frame that I was drawing. I was then going to flip it in like a back buffer flipping to the front. You incur a large speed hit writing directly to VRAM when you can not write two pixels at a time, because VRAM can not be accessed as 16-bit (I had to do a read-modify-write). Then, I never worked on getting the page to flip in, I did a VRAM to VRAM dma. I moved the frame buffer into EWRAM and it is much faster now.
August 14, 2005 -- Got sound working!
I finally found what was not working and got the project building with Release 15. I do not understand it,but I had a character array, char name8[9]. To make string compare easy, I turned it into and int, like this: int v1 = *(int *)name8 (the first four characters anyway). This was working with Release 13, but not Release 15. I am using playGenericSound to play the sounds. I do not understand how to use playSound yet.
I also have the save game working fully now (this took a long time too, I had an odd inventory bug), and menu options save to the SRAM so you lefties do not have to select "Left Handed" every time you turn it on.