mardi 27 septembre 2022

Beta Tests of Phase 1 over – Public Release

 

It has been a while since I updated my blog. Of course real life takes a very good part of my spare time on my projects but I am quite stubborn and keep working on those J

The beta testing of the microcode in its current state is now considered as over. I could not find many testers to do the job so most of those tests were done actually on my own.

I would say that it was quite a good exercise to do as I got to document, at least high level, the way the new functions works. By converting various demos to the microcode from the original SDK I was able to realize some minor but still important issues in my code, affecting texturing and lighting for instance.

I also tried to push further my DMEM optimization and now I have a 40 vertex cache available, with a colors and texture coordinates buffer of the same size. It is already better than F3DEX2. I still believe that there should be a way to do much better. There is somehow an issue related to RSP yielding from/to the CPU but I have not been able to spot the root cause of the issue (yet).

Now after writing down the development of the microcode, I have decided to share to public the binary (not the source) of the microcode in hope that some nice yet adventurous N64 programmers will share their feedback and even their wishes to my end. For those who would like to test you may find more information on N64brew discord channel.

I will now focus on the next phase of implementation. More to come!