Finally!! :)

Started by duocast, 05 April 2004, 11:49:01

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duocast

Hey long time no post! Anywayz check this out:

http://www.ngemu.com/index.php?action=post&id=1646

The article will pretty much tell all, but in-light of people who ponder "to click, or not to click" here is your article:

Finally, after 6 months wait, Gontez has released a new version of the N64 gfx plugin, Glide64. Since this version included many interesting features that seemed impossible to run on 3dfx cards, this version was named "miracle". Here's the list of changes for this release :
Hardware frame buffer emulation (HWFBE). Such feature was first introduced in glN64 plugin by Orkin. HWFBE allows plugin to use video memory for auxiliary frame buffers. This greatly speed ups frame buffer emulation and improves image quality. Frame buffer effects like motion blur now work as smooth as on real console and in high resolution. This feature also allowed me to emulate many things which are hardly possible to emulate with usual frame buffer emulation, e.g. dynamic shadows. HWFBE is fully supported only by Voodoo4/5 and partially by Voodoo3 and Banshee. Read readme.txt for details. Many thanks to KoolSmoky who gave me Voodoo5 card and hints how to implement this feature.


Long long long awaited Conker's Bad Fur Day support! This game was partially supported yet by v0.1, but it was unplayable due to heavy graphics errors. I found that these errors were caused by improper dynamic lighting emulation. When I removed dynamic lighting, problems were gone! Of course, the game looks incorrect without lighting, but currently no video plugin emulates lighting in this game correctly. PJ64 plugin by Jabo also does not emulated it at all. Beside this, the game looks perfect. As usual, all frame buffer effects are supported, including dynamic Conker's shadow (HWFBE is required for shadow).


Perfect Dark support. The game works nearly perfect, almost all frame buffer effects emulated correctly, including lens effect when cam spy is used. Voodoo4/5 users should use HWFBE to get full speed with frame buffer effects. I have used sources of TR64Ogl and glN64 to get information about microcode for this game, thanks to Icepir8 and Orkin!


Jet Force Gemini and Mickey's Speedway USA support. These 2 games use the same microcode as Diddy Kong Racing, only slightly modified. Again, all frame buffer effects are supported.


Voodoo3/4/5 and Banshee users can get dynamic shadows in JFG thanks to HWFBE. I have used sources of glN64 and RiceDeadalus to modify microcode for these games, thanks to Orkin and Rice!
Dr.Mario 64 support. Rice and schibo have added few extensions to Zilmar's plugin specifications. These extensions are designed to help video plugin with some kind of frame buffer emulation and they are supported by new 1964 and Rice's video plugin. I have implemented these extensions too, so Dr.Mario 64 is fully playable now.


Partial YUV textures support. N64 allows game to store images in JPEG format to save valuable space in ROM cartridge. This possibility is rarely used though, may be because JPEG compression leads to quality lost. However one game, Ogre Battle 64, uses it a lot, probably because it's the only way to put huge number of backgrounds into N64 cartridge. YUV is intermediate format for JPEG compression/decompression. Texture must be converted from YUV into common RGB format to be usable. This could be done by lot of ways since there are lot of YUV formats, and it was unclear which one is used by N64. I have decrypted format used by Ogre battle 64, and now this game is fully playable! However, my decoding method may not work for other games which use YUV textures.


Large textures support in sprite microcode. This fixes a bug in Yoshi's Story and makes Neon Genesis Evangelion playable!


Fixed a bug in TexrectFlip - all problems with text in Wetrix are gone!


Implemented/fixed combiners for many many games. Most drastic results can be seen in Beetle Adventure Racing and Roadsters Trophy.


Configuration dialog is changed a bit to avoid confusions when "Use custom ini settings" option is used. Ini file is greatly improved to make this option really useful.

Tons of other fixes and improvements.

Download Glide64 Me from: http://www.ngemu.com/download.php?action=plugin&id=38

Click here to visit the official Glide64 homepage: http://glide64.emuxhaven.net/

if you read all that give yourself a pat on the back [:p] But basically what this all means is simple, anybody with a Voodoo card can run N64 games with a dramatic increase in performance and compatibility, But whats more interesting to add is that our very own KoolSmokey actually gave advice to this guy/helped in the development progess of this release :) you can find the link of him mentioning KoolSmokey's help in the development progess Here:

http://www.emuxhaven.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=3970&hl=kool

Questions/Comments? ;)
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg."
- Bjarne Stroustrup

Knuckles

#1
I have no question, no comments, only to say that.... those beta testing weeks has been great [:P] (yep, I'm beta tester [:P])