Sega Tween
Thursday, 1st February 2007
No updates for a while, I'm afraid - things have been pretty hectic.
I packaged up and released the Sega Tween demo I'd been working on. As you can see, I added an SMS and a 3D mode - this works with the SMS 3D glasses. The extra 3D is quite cheap to calculate - shift the rotated X coordinates one way for one eye, then the other way for the other eye. After projection to the screen they need to be shifted back a little way to re-centre, but it works quite well.
However, I had neglected the fact that the SMS1 (which has the card slot, and hence the model that supports the 3D glasses) had a bug in the VDP and as such only supports four zoomed sprites per scanline. I added this glitch to the emulator;
In other news, I've done a small amount of work on Brass. It's quite embarrassing, really, how slow the old version is. Assembling this file:
.rept 9000 ld a,1 .unsquish ld a,2 .squish ret .loop
...produces this in old Brass:
Brass Z80 Assembler 1.0.4.9 - Ben Ryves 2005-2006 ------------------------------------------------- Assembling... Pass 1 complete. (2093ms). Pass 2 complete. (22062ms). Writing output file... Errors: 0, Warnings: 0. Done!
Nearly half a minute! New Brass does a much better job of syntax parsing and caching...
Brass Assembler - Copyright © Bee Development 2005-2007 ------------------------------------------------------- ZiLOG Z80 - Copyright © Bee Development 2005-2006 TI Program Files - Copyright © Bee Development 2005-2006 Core Plugins - Copyright © Bee Development 2005-2006 Parsing source... Building... Writing output... Time taken: 484.38ms. Done!
Down to just under half a second. That's almost a 50× speed increase!