Sega Saturn Development > General Jo Engine Help

Graphics and memory managment

(1/2) > >>

b1tsh1ft3r:
So i've been slowly porting over a game from another platform that i built years ago but never fully completed. Im optimizing image sizes currently and i've notice i'm using up the 1mb Vram quickly!

Is there any existing method to hold some of this image data in high or low ram and swap into vram when needed or have the vdp display the data that resides in high or low ram? I'm not entirely familiar with the hardware side of the saturn. If anyone has insight, please reply! I honestly just don't know the saturn hardware well enough to know if what i'm wanting to do is possible.

XL2:
Yes you can : you can use the new jo engine cpu dma transfer function. That's how you can do your animations without storing all the frames in the 512 kb texture memory. You can also use paletted sprites (currently 8 bits only) to hold 2 times more textures. You should also use the vdp2 for background and foregrount elements since you have another 512 kb there and it's very powerful.

Mr. Potatobadger:
I'm a bit late to the punch here, but I highly recommend using palettes graphics. It's limited to 256 colors I'm pretty sure, but that's realistically more than enough, and it saves a ton of memory. However, at the moment, there's not really a good way to convert images into the format without writing a simple script

I plan on making a fully fledged tool eventually than can convert images into the paletted format, and also help you manage the palette registers.

XL2:
No need, I'm already working on it for 4 bits CLUT and/or CRAM. You will need to preprocess your images (like on Gimp, you convert it to a 16 colors palette but save it as 32 bits RGB image). Of course, the CRAM is limited to 2048 colors, so the CLUT is more useful for most situations.

b1tsh1ft3r:

--- Quote from: XL2 on October 30, 2017, 09:08:45 pm ---Yes you can : you can use the new jo engine cpu dma transfer function. That's how you can do your animations without storing all the frames in the 512 kb texture memory. You can also use paletted sprites (currently 8 bits only) to hold 2 times more textures. You should also use the vdp2 for background and foregrount elements since you have another 512 kb there and it's very powerful.

--- End quote ---

Perhaps I'm missing something or the documentation is out of date here? Are there any good examples showing how to utilize the vdp2 for basic functionality such as you have described? (Setting background and foreground elements for display). Id like to try to utilize this for the MAP that is draw on screen and any UI stuff as well.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page