Game:

Scorched Planet (1996)

Duration: 0:00

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3

The HUD/cockpit view glitches have been fixed (until someone tells me otherwise).

The only thing that was needed was two wrapper profile parameters which limited texture extent. Not all Speedy3D or RRedline apps need this. The difference in behaviour is caused the microcode. RReady doesn't actually process the microcode, instead using manually crafted behaviour profiles designed to get the app to render correctly. (The original microcode still has to be used because the address of the framebuffer, what's visible on screen, is dependent on the size of the framebuffer. Speedy3D apps are static linked and the frame buffer address has to be determined by running the microcode and reading the FIFO Out. Unfortunately RReady only simulates this behaviour just enough to keep the app running so the framebuffer has to be hardcoded per app. This is I think on the first 4KB boundary after the microcode).

This approach does have its limitations. Vogon ‪@WhiteMagicRaven‬ discovered that vQuake's bilinear filtering toggle doesn't do what it's supposed and the dithering control toggles filtering. The reason for this is both these settings use undocumented numeric commands both of which are set to the same value at the same time. So during development it's not possible to figure out which value does what. Once it's all done, the values can be filtered out and fixed. Unfortunately I haven't had much time to do.

While I was looking at the CGL support earlier, one thing I noticed is that it wasn't loading ucode. It was in fact directly writing state changes into internal registers. RReady and Dosbox-Rendition (+staging) don't have a directl implementation of register state changes, other than what's needed for Speedy3D. The ucocde would automatically change state, but RReady can ignore it and directly interpret Speedy3D commands app by app. On original hardware, the ucode would interpret the command and execute state changes. RRedline doesn't need the numeric commands (Speedy3D opcodes), but some games use a combination of high-level and opcode rendering. (heavy gear, vhexen II and some other. vQuake randomly issues a texture coordinate multipler opcode change, but it can be ignored. RReady doesn't ignore it anymore, but in the early days it did.)

This isn't live in the store yet. I know there's one user who was asked for a Scorched Planet setup guide. There're a lot more users playing ICR2, I'm guessing based on bugs reported (I have no idea what games are being played. This isn't being tracked or anything). I don't think anyone's playing vQuake, so that bug gets pushed waay down to the bottom of the list.

I'll have to do a release with the Scorched Planet fix next week, probably at the end of the week. I would like to spend some time looking at Descent 2, but probably will head back to ICR2 analysis on Tuesday.

Monday's a traditional new year here, it's always the same week as Easter. I think a few other countries have it around the second week of April as well, like Thailand and Japan. Enough with the digression.

So Happy Sinhala and Tamil New Year everyone!