gbadev.org forum archive

I am not a coder in any way shape or form. I do not yet own a passme or GBAMP yet, but I plan to purchase one in the near future.

I am however very interested in DS homebrew and have been lurking around dev forums and blogs. Thanks to drunkencoders I've found out about an Apple Plus emulator on the DS.

Now for the reason on why I'm here... On one of the comments on Lazyone's blog, someone posted the following:

Quote:

Really nice! I have an idea for reducing screen size: why not giving an option to put the screen in a grayscale mode, reducing the size to 1/2 per direction?
It should be quite easy to implement, fast, and the detail you lose is partially recovered by the grayscale.
Something like reducing a 4 bw pixel square to a 5 gray level pixel should still give a readable screen?
cheers

I have taken a brief look at how scaling would work, how it would be done and how good it would look.

Text would be a problem, it's close to readable but not 100% - which is fine for games I guess.

As for speed, the only cost for rendering the 1bpp mac display is reading two values from a pre-calculated lookup table for every 8 pixels.

To render the entire 512x342 screen takes about 11ms, rendering a 256x192 area takes only 3-4ms but requires further changes to how minivmac tells the platform code to render the screen.
In addition, not all of that screen needs to be updated all the time either so there's more room for improvement there aswell.

Since I have much more important work to do on the emulator I will not be looking into scaling right at this moment.
However, since Mini vMac is GPL anyone can request the source and add it in if they want.

#6 BACHMAN! I loved that game.

#4 Tetris? But why? We already have Tetris DS (Game Card) and TOD (homebrew).

I would imagine that the scaling could be improved by using orange and blue subpixels. It'd produce a bit of fringing on single-pixel-wide fonts such as Geneva and Monaco (non-bold), but that would just result in a charming Apple ][ feel. And I'd suggest an exact 2:1 scaling (down to 256x171), not 256x192.
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-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.

tepples wrote:

And I'd suggest an exact 2:1 scaling (down to 256x171), not 256x192.

If somebody was playing around with scaling, it would also be interesting to try leaving the menu bar at 100% and scaling the content area of the screen to 50%. Might be much more tricky to emulate though as you'd probably have to patch a couple of the menu routines.

I would have liked it it when the screen is scrolling, for it not to go past the edge of the mac-screen, ie, keep the pointer centered unless your at an edge, then move freely, I hope I explained that good enough.

Is this emu capable of color?
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I have thought about putting in an options page where things like mouse behaviour and key binding could be modified.
That would come whenever I decide to re-do the input/sub gfx system which is a ways off unless someone else wants to do it.

My next focus is on speeding up the emulator a bit in hopes of reaching 30fps.

And no, the emulator does not support a colour display.

gbadev.org forum archive

DS development > Mac Emulator Suggestion

#95786 - Mikelx215 - Mon Jul 31, 2006 2:30 am

#95790 - Lazy1 - Mon Jul 31, 2006 3:18 am

#95805 - tepples - Mon Jul 31, 2006 4:35 am

#95819 - ecurtz - Mon Jul 31, 2006 6:15 am

#95873 - spinal_cord - Mon Jul 31, 2006 11:27 am

#95922 - Lazy1 - Mon Jul 31, 2006 3:12 pm