Barone's Hacking Corner

Most racing games probably could be optimized better yeah (no idea what they're really doing however). Though there's the issue that they need to decompress graphics on the fly for the scenery as you drive around and they tend to hide that in the poor framerate (loading new graphics tends to eat a whole frame on its own), not sure how bad that'd get.

Road Rash in particular on the other hand is slowed down badly due to the software rendering so yeah you'd have to drop that (the Master System port does this, albeit it's slow since it needs to render in software the road instead).

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Originally Posted by Barone

Some update on Corporation/Cyber-Cop:
- Optimized a few more routines but there's still a lot of work to do. Many routines look like a mess in terms of directly manipulating memory data instead of using registers.
- The routine which shows the on-screen map is also a mess and it caused some noticeable impact in the frame rate due to that. There's a multiplication I can replace there and lots of memory accesses to get rid of.
- It's not an easy task to have to pay attention and manually recalculate some jumps and branches of the optimized functions. I've broken/caused bugs several times due to that but I keep testing every change on real hardware in order to seek and destroy any issue created by the changes.

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Ey Barone, how Corporation is doing? I loved that game, and I was very excited to know you were working on improving this rare gem game :)



Awesome!

Didn't you miss Race drivin' and the likes?

Also Super hang on rev a is the second version or the first one with the malboro knockoff ads and different controls?

Virtua Racing doesn't improve with OC because everything is done by the SVP chip, right? Is there any emulator that supports SVP OCing. That would make the game look 100 times better

There's no way Space Harrier II runs at 60 FPS (save for the palette animation of the floor).

Emulators already run Virtua Racing with the SVP possibly overclocked (the exact clock speed is not known, so they just run it fast enough that it doesn't slow down). The 15FPS cap is imposed by the game itself and you can't work around it without hacking the game (and even then, I don't think you can get more than 30FPS, or even 20FPS, due to lack of memory bandwidth).

EDIT: added "possibly", because honestly I don't know if it ever slows down on the real thing. For all we know it's still underclocked.

Yes VR has some slowdown on real hardware IIRC. But it's "underclocked" compared to what?

Also why is there a software FPS cap on some games (VR) but not others (Road Rash) ?



Sonic 2 at 9 fps? What are we talking about exactly ? Bonus stages ?





I created a thread for you kaiser68000,and included your list.This is Barone's thread so no need to post that list in here.

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Originally Posted by Barone

No, I've never looked into those games.

But:
- Space Harrier II on the MD looks awful IMO. And it could've been better, maybe an 8 Mbit cartridge release in 1990 or so could have done the trick for it.
When you compare Space Harrier: Return To The Fantasy Zone on the Amiga 500 to Space Harrier II on the MD you can see that the Amiga game has far better animation for the most part (both videos are from real hardware):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWfWSsVptn4

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Is that the NTSC version of Space Harrier: Return To The Fantasy Zone playing on an NTSC Amiga?

I know the PAL version was optimized and already looked and played very good, so I suspect NTSC could be even better. :D

Shame the MD didn't get a proper port of the game.:(

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Originally Posted by Nightwolf

Ey Barone, how Corporation is doing? I loved that game, and I was very excited to know you were working on improving this rare gem game :)

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I haven't touch any hacking-related task in a while, to be very honest with you. During the last year or so I focused a lot more on my professional career, thus why I have been far less active in the forum in general.
I also spent a lot of time taking some proper care of my health, nutricional habits, etc. So the last year was really pushing me in other directions.

I miss the feeling of going through the code trying to find ways to optimize it while having a good cup of coffee but in a realistic scenario IDK if I'd take that over the activities that occupy my schedule nowadays. Furthermore, now I'm leading a team of developers in the company I work, so I have greater responsibilities. Not only technically speaking (migration to a newer platform, UI redesign, etc.), but also in terms of finding ways to develop the soft skills of my colleagues and provide a healthy, positive working environment for them.

The last time I worked on the Corporation hack was in August of 2016. At the time, I managed to fix a nasty bug I had introduced due to some risky re-rewriting of the code (forcing the direction of some branches in order to avoid *apparently* unused conditional statements) and pretty much finished the optimization of the code section I was working on since the beginning.
I also recorded a few tests comparing both the original and my version in order to see if the optimizations had resulted in any noticeable performance gain. I then frame advanced those videos and could measure a improved of 2 fps in most scenes.
I consider 2 fps very, very little in terms of delivering a noticeably better gameplay experience, but there's still a LOT that can be optimize in its code and most of the stuff related to the enemies' rendering I have not even touched yet. So there's room for improvement. In my dream I'd like to see a 4 fps improvement - 'cause that would be pretty noticeable - but IDK how long it will take me to reach that point considering all things I explained above.

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Originally Posted by MegaDriver

Is that the NTSC version of Space Harrier: Return To The Fantasy Zone playing on an NTSC Amiga?
I know the PAL version was optimized and already looked and played very good, so I suspect NTSC could be even better. :D
Shame the MD didn't get a proper port of the game.:(

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I believe that capture is from the PAL version of the game running on a PAL system.

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Originally Posted by Barone

I haven't touch any hacking-related task in a while, to be very honest with you. During the last year or so I focused a lot more on my professional career, thus why I have been far less active in the forum in general.
I also spent a lot of time taking some proper care of my health, nutricional habits, etc. So the last year was really pushing me in other directions.

I miss the feeling of going through the code trying to find ways to optimize it while having a good cup of coffee but in a realistic scenario IDK if I'd take that over the activities that occupy my schedule nowadays. Furthermore, now I'm leading a team of developers in the company I work, so I have greater responsibilities. Not only technically speaking (migration to a newer platform, UI redesign, etc.), but also in terms of finding ways to develop the soft skills of my colleagues and provide a healthy, positive working environment for them.

The last time I worked on the Corporation hack was in August of 2016. At the time, I managed to fix a nasty bug I had introduced due to some risky re-rewriting of the code (forcing the direction of some branches in order to avoid *apparently* unused conditional statements) and pretty much finished the optimization of the code section I was working on since the beginning.
I also recorded a few tests comparing both the original and my version in order to see if the optimizations had resulted in any noticeable performance gain. I then frame advanced those videos and could measure a improved of 2 fps in most scenes.
I consider 2 fps very, very little in terms of delivering a noticeably better gameplay experience, but there's still a LOT that can be optimize in its code and most of the stuff related to the enemies' rendering I have not even touched yet. So there's room for improvement. In my dream I'd like to see a 4 fps improvement - 'cause that would be pretty noticeable - but IDK how long it will take me to reach that point considering all things I explained above.

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I understand and its great to take care of yourself. Well, I hope you release the improvement, I know Corporation is not a popular game, but its one of my secret pleasure (I dont know, but I love the old 3d games like Corporation, or recently the amazing Star Cruiser, before 3d was mainstream) Anyway, hope you find some time, that 4fps dream is mine too!! Again, thank you for your response.

As requested, I put some work on it during this last weekend.

I've detected that I had introduced two bugs:
- Weapon power meter bug (from v1 to v2 hack revision). It's just cosmetic, I think, due to a value changed (something that I changed from 80 to 7F in order to use moveq instruction *facepalm*). It shouldn't be hard to find and fix it in the code.
- Primary weapon (punch) isn't being rendered anymore (from v23 to v24 hack revision) (I'm currently on v25).

Shameful bugs I'd say but, then again, it shows me how hard it is to work on these things without any professional process. I should have structured all these things since day 1, but it was just a time waster activity at first - that was a stupid view anyway.

During these last days I managed to optimize another one of rendering methods. It was a very short one but it served well the purpose of getting used to it again after several months of complete inactivity.

Next time I work on it I need to fix the two bugs I mentioned above and then go on with the optimizations.