Programming Discussion Thread

[Ramoth]

(12-07-2014, 02:07 AM)Shonumi Wrote: I assume you're talking about the DS emulation part, correct? Yes, the goal is to feature "enhancements". AA is probably trivial to implement, but shader support will be added long before I even touch DS emulation. Eventually, I'm going to move from SDL to SDL2 to gain access to OpenGL 3.0+ and programmable shaders, so it's really just a matter of learning GLSL and all that fun stuff. Shaders will first be used for 2D scaling filters (HQx, xBR, etc) but hopefully I can work out something like Dolphin has. Just imagine, all of your GBA games, in sepia

HD textures don't sound too hard either; in theory it's no different than what GBE already does for DMG games. Hash the graphical data, store and look up entries in a cache, replace the data when necessary. Of course, for HD textures, the emu will have to support internal resolutions greater than 1x. But higher resolutions is a priority feature anyway (and one of the only reasons I ever got interested in DS emulation).

But DS emulation is down the road at this point. Granted, I've made some really good progress on the GBA (what I have done now, I didn't expect to see done until the summer of 2015), it'll probably be another year before development gets anywhere (e.g. playing games, even in a broken state). Who knows though; currently I've been making commits every day to GBE+ for the past 77 days. I'm in a mentality that I have to fix or add something all the time, else I'm wasting my time. Perhaps I'll get there sooner than I anticipate.

That's great to hear about enhancements I wish you good luck. HD tile/texture replacement should be possible also for GB/GBC too because HDNes https://github.com/mkwong98/HDNes has this featue. Bilinear and trilinear texture filtering should work for 2D so is any texture filtering even possible for GBC/GBA ? Perhaps you can copy some things related to DS emulation from Desmume ? It should be somewhat more readable than VBA-M. Are you planning to implement JIT for DS part ?