the game I'm porting Do is your game a port? I'll leave you to guess. Bullet hell, may be? Yes. More bullets than the SNES could handle as hardware sprites, even if there were nothing else onscreen. Hence the Super FX, to draw them in software. ... I really need to get to work on the audio engine...

It's proceeding slowly. I've had to devote the bulk of my mental energy to real life, so I haven't been able to make much progress on actually finishing up this project. Part of the problem is that my actual job seems to use most of the same parts of my brain as this hobby, so the harder I try at it...

Off-topic to the current conversation but of curiosity what ever happened to that one trick that Randy Linden mentioned, something involving HDMA, that would have allowed the game to reach double its current speed? Was that not feasible? Oh, I'm sure it's feasible. It's just not trivial, and it's n...

Put the canvas in the tilemap. Each byte drawn to the tilemap represents two texels side by side. This unfortunately only works if the graphics are 4bpp. If any pixel can be any of 256 different colours (which is necessary in a Doom port, though not perhaps in a Doom-like indie knockoff), you need ...

No, the problem is that the whole viewport can't be updated in one shot because the bandwidth is too low. There's only so much data that can be updated between the last time the old frame is drawn to the TV and the first time the new frame is drawn, and any framebuffer data that doesn't fit in that ...

This has been bugging me for some time, but I never got around to fixing it. I've edited this post and this post to reflect the fact that Mode 7 increases the VRAM usage of a framebuffer. This is due to the fact that whether you're using pixel-as-texel or tile-as-texel format, you can't really use t...

Oh hey. Thanks for the rip. I wasn't referring to the bonus intro (which is indeed in stereo), but rather the boot logo fanfare. It always plays in mono on first boot, so AFAIK the only way to hear it in stereo is to set the sound to stereo, get a game over, and let the game restart. I assumed the r...

It appears there is at least one actual bug, beyond what I describe above. The Force Field powerup doesn't work properly - it seems to just take phantom hits until it's gone. This happens fairly quickly (on the order of a second or so), making the powerup entirely useless. I know this hack is a work...

I've been checking out a WIP FastROM hack of Gradius III that reduces slowdown without using the SA-1 (so it works on a Super Everdrive). I believe it's slidelljohn's hack with contributions by psycopathicteen and others. It's really quite nice; large swaths of the game seem to be slowdown-free, and...

inc isn't an instruction, or even an opcode. It's a mnemonic for the use of the assembler. It can be used to refer to several different 8-bit opcodes, each corresponding to a different addressing mode. Think of it this way. Bytes are just bytes. The CPU has no way of distinguishing a 2-byte address...

How to declare a higher WRAM BANK in WLA-DX WLA-65816? For example 01x0000? I'm pretty sure you can .DEFINE anything you want. If you must make a list of variables and sizes, apparently .RAMSECTION is designed to do this, but I've never used it. Why are you making a list of variables in high RAM an...

tl;dr I think Randy's onto something. Probably not a full 100% performance improvement, but potentially a big chunk of that in spots. Vertical rasterization (which Doom is full of) is surprisingly expensive on Super FX, and the trick I think he's talking about can help with that.

So basically Randy Linden says that the doom cartrige had a max of 2MB rom - but not really confirming its the max of the FX chip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIauSQ_hIgo&lc=UgyjN6whjKJar3Sxu4V4AaABAg Oh hey, that's new. Yeah, I'm not sure that's definitive. It certainly matches the conventi...

Yes, you could. Like I said, ASP uses this for a small number of scanlines. It's also just for the mission start text, so the CPU load probably isn't all that important anyway. I use it for a large number of scanlines. I have a 192-line playfield (that's usually Mode 7) next to a Mode 1 sidebar, and...

Yes, that's easy. It's probably unnecessary too, because of how flexible the SNES is in terms of tile count and tilemap sizes. But you can't use a BG layer for the HUD if the level uses all of the available layers in the same area of the screen the HUD appears in. Mode 7 is particularly nasty becaus...