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Alright, that's pretty simple then. Thanks! Gonna add a couple things in case anyone stumbles across this thread looking for info, because we could always use more SNES documentation: - If you use initsnes.asm, register $4201 is initialized to #$ff, so when latching the counter you should clear and ...

I started writing a DMA manager and I think it'd be useful to know just how far into (or past) VBlank I am after all the DMA stuff has been completed. So it'd be cool if I could just grab the vertical scanline counter. The register docs mention something about setting the appropriate IOBit and then ...

The CPU limited RAM throughput?? Ummm, if that's the case then FastROM wouldn't have been a thing. I'm pretty sure the slow RAM throughput is because... the RAM is slow. Also I'm pretty sure that 16-bit operations are at worst case one cycle slower than the same thing in 8-bit. Has this person ever ...

Nobody says you have to use the full slot when drawing a single sprite. You can just use a 16-tile slot for a 4x1 tile graphic, though since you have space leftover you might as well cram in a few frames of animation so there is less DMAing going on. My game is actually going to be using 32x32 pixel...

I actually thought about making a game using Mode 5 once! I'm not sure if the background depth trade-off is worth it though, and presumably the sprites would remain at standard resolution.

What are you even talking about? If you mean that BGs will get clipped due to overdraw, the answer is never, 3 BGs will always display as 3 BGs. That question was referring to the Genesis VDP. Sorry if that wasn't clear. You should see the ambitious junk I tried to do in solving this problem, tryin...

What happens when you have all three planes overlapping in one tile at once? Does it just make the Plane A tile disappear? I wonder if this could be used for special effects?

Looks like a(nother) case of Qt's font metrics having problems. The register edit boxes are supposed to be sized for n+1 digits. Do the memory viewer and the main debug window have sane default sizes, at least? I did some tests by changing the font size via qt4-config and it looks like those fields...

The Genesis has a "window plane" (which doesn't support transparency). I prefer having an open-air HUD even if the tile data for it is only 2BPP. I'm not wild about the 16kb sprite char limit. Sometimes I wish I could have been able to fit in just a few more explosion sprites. Instead, I t...

A few more thoughts I have: I think arcade spec is kinda overrated because of how easy it is to make a powerful arcade system. Cost is largely a non-factor since you're just selling to arcade operators and not home users. Designing affordable hardware for home use is arguably far more challenging. I...

While we're at it, a quick bug report. The edit boxes for the register values are too small on my machine:

Gradius 3 was a launch title running on SloROM and a home port of an arcade title that already had plenty of slowdown so it's a pretty unfair example to use. Hell, it's actually quite performant compared to, say, Metal Slug 2. I've been doing a lot of planning on my own game and I think I could defi...

Small progress on the editor, which can now read SNES char and palette data. Also this might be among the first 16-bit console hacking/editing tools to be written in something other than Win32?

Animated GIF (thumbnail seems to have glitched so please fullview it):

I picked up WLA-DX because I saw it used in C frameworks as well as bazz's tutorials which helped me get started on development. I don't know a lot about assemblers right now so having more helpful error messages would be a welcome addition. It would also be nice if it could point out some of the im...

I used to take the stack-based approach before I realized that a simple sta and lda on the DP is faster (and more flexible). So far I haven't run out of space in the DP so I'm using separate variables for different things instead of reusing the same scratch space. Edit: For protecting the caller fro...