Originally Posted by
Lordus
I'm trying to relax now, when i hear the scaling question for the 100th time, but it's not always easy ;)
No, the screen can't be scaled like NeoDS does it. If I could do that, then I can tell you that I would, instead of having stupid workarounds like panning and the follow d-pad option.
The NeoGeo composes it's screen almost entirely out of sprites, that NeoDS renders in 3D. With 3D it's relatively easy to scale the whole thing.
The Genesis has 2 background layers and 1 sprite layer, each of which can have high or low priorities (selectable on a per tile basis). So effectively the screen can be composed out of 6 layers. To do this with the DS hardware i need all the 4 backgrounds it offers. Just 2 of those backgrounds can be scaled in hardware, and software scaling is out of the question.
The other alternative is software rendering, where you compose a bitmap out of all Genesis layers, which you can then draw on a single DS background and scale it in hardware.
The downside of this is, that it is incredibly slow. I can tell you, that a typical PC Genesis emulator probably spends about 50% of all its time in software rendering. That's a more than the emulation of the 2 CPUs takes (except the CPU cores are very unoptimized).