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Stingray
Account closed
Registered: Feb 2003
Posts: 117 |
FASTER 3D GRAPHICS
I've heard it said before that the way the VIC chip addresses memory (8x8 cells) makes it slower fo rendering graphics because of the extra calculations needed. So what way would you have had the Commodore engineers design an alternative addressing mode so that 3D graphics could be calculated quicker? I would realy appreciate your ideas on this. |
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Graham
Account closed
Registered: Dec 2002
Posts: 990 |
@Oswald: A lot of posts refer to doing "display lists" for register writes. Just read some of the recent posts. |
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QuasaR
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 145 |
Me likes Notorious V.I.C. but maybe it's too long... ;) |
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Oswald
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5020 |
Quote: @Oswald: A lot of posts refer to doing "display lists" for register writes. Just read some of the recent posts.
I believe people simply spared the time writing this: "(yes I know that a display list does not write registers, but I am just using loosely this term because it comes close to this thing)"
I would think Martin & Krill are smart enough to know what atari display lists are exactly. |
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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2847 |
Yeah, without knowing both the Atari ANTIC and Amiga Copper lists in detail, I think our register list here is something in between the two. It writes actual registers and does not just switch modes, but only on the video chip (plus DMA for the 16kB of RAM visible to it), but cannot write the registers of the other chips on the bus.
But that's an academic discussion, so we should rather discuss the best way to implement this list so the overhead required to both execute and generate it is minimal. |
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Oswald
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5020 |
how about this:
have a list of registers and values to write for each line, and you can specify horizontally the cycle where it should start stuffing the regs. HW would buffer up the needed regs and values one line before.
list would look like:
$horizontal,$reg,$val,$reg,$val,$ff
$horizontal,$reg,$val,$reg,$val,$ff
$horizontal,$reg,$val,$reg,$val,$ff
$ff
$ff= stop/do nothing
$horizontal each line could be skipped and just set up by the cpu once, for most stuff it would be a constant anyway I guess.
$ff could be skipped aswell if we maintain a constant nr of regs&vals. some dummy color reg writes wont hurt. |
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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2847 |
There is a variable number of possible write cycles though, depending on which sprites are enabled and badline or not. And the chip also needs to fetch that list. Upload it to some chip-internal RAM or DMA or colour bus? |
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Martin Piper
Registered: Nov 2007
Posts: 634 |
Quoting GrahamA display list is just what the name says: a list of modes to display. No registers involved.
Not correct. A "display list" can be for example a sequence of commands to draw vector lines on a display.
Quoting GrahamSome circuit doing register loads is not a display list.
Also not correct. Graham, I come from the old days when a "display list" was any method, hardware or software, used to optimise writing to display hardware registers. On various systems writing to the display hardware registers in a short amount of time was advantageous because then the writes could be squeezed in the VBLANK or HBLANK and remove visible artifacts.
For example during my time at Argonaut Games the term "display list" was used quite a lot in this context. I particularly remember SEGA Triforce arcade hardware mentioning display lists.
So while Atari could be argued to have used the term "display list" early on the term was also used in relation to other systems during the old games programming days. |
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Stingray
Account closed
Registered: Feb 2003
Posts: 117 |
VIC X (VIC eXpanded / VIC eXtreme): 3 VOTES
Notorious V.I.C : 2 VOTES
BAD VIC : 1 VOTES
VIC III: 1 VOTES
Alien VIC : 1 VOTES (My own vote)
VIC ENHANCER : 0 VOTES
VIC UNLEASHED : 0 VOTES
VIC INTERCEPTOR : 0 VOTES
VIC AAA (Awesome Addressing Add-on) : 0 VOTES
Added VIC III (I think PopMilo suggested this) |
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Conjuror
Registered: Aug 2004
Posts: 168 |
I vote for VIC eXtreme |
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Skate
Registered: Jul 2003
Posts: 491 |
VIC-X is nice. VIC eXpanded makes more sense than VIC eXtreme to me. So my vote goes to "VIC eXpanded". |
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