Saturday, December 01, 2007

SuperCPU: Wowza!

You know the more I toy with this machine, the more I'm blown away by it. Now that I have a reasonably stable assembler I can see just what its capable of.

For example, a full BITMAP copy using the block transfer instruction runs in at around 56 scan lines (7 characters high), while a transfer to NON vic memory runs in at around 40 scan lines (5 chars high). Thats fast, really fast! Normally, this would take over a frame to do. It means that software sprites AND bitmap scrolling is easily possible, and it would be interesting to take over the XeO3 sprite routine and apply it to a bitmap screen.

I suspect you could do a parallax bitmap scroll in the same way I did a character one, but by using a bitmap screen you would get access to many more colours.

If you ran the game in 2 frames (same as XeO3), you would have a phenominal ammount of CPU time to burn, and could probably fill the screen with software sprites!

All that said, I am still having problems using the SuperCPU to its fullest as I can't seem to access the higher banks without it locking up (using the block transfer instruction).

For those interested, I've been using THIS PAGE as my 65816 refrence. Although I do have an old 65816 cycle sheet from my SNES days somewhere....


You know, the more I think about it, the more I think that 16Mb of RAM and sprite caches would be amazing! I need to do a new SuperCPU demo :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does that mean you may radically change the real core of the sprite system in order to doublebuffer a big slice of its graphics directly on bitmap, instead of charsets?

Mike said...

nonononono.... I'd simply port it to the SuperCPU and render to a bitmap instead :)