Beyond expectations

Lately I've been quite obsessed with Super Mario 64 DS. First idea to get it rendering more accurately was to fix compressed textures support. I had just finished writing a compressed textures demo when masscat committed fixes to my code compressed handling code on the CVS, so I forgot about compressed textures, as he already fixed them.

After that, I worked on getting transparency and translucency better, so the water and the tree shadows looked as expected. After that, only the holes on some meshes were left, and the sky clipping. The first one was fixed rather easy, as I made a big mistake on my code to change matrices per vertex. I assumed that the matrices were changed at most per primitive, not per vertex! After discussing it with masscat, I just realized my mistake and fixed it in a few minutes (in fact, I had already coded the needed stuff in the past). The second one was just simple depth clipping, so it was easily fixable.

After getting Super Mario 64 DS to render almost perfect (only shadow support missing and some tweaking), I wanted to start the new core. Basically what I call the "new core" is just adding FIFO and Quad Strip reordering support to the current one. The first one is needed to emulate properly the FIFO GFX irq, which are used on almost all advanced 3D games. Without it, games like FF3, New Super Mario Bros, Sonic Rush or Golden Eye:Rogue Agent, would simply freeze. Quad Strip reordering is needed because it uses a different format than the standard PC gfx card one. As I wanted to be sure if the GFX FIFO irq was what made several games freeze (the ones listed above), I just hacked the support, and got some impressive results. In the near future I'll start proper support, but as of now it's fun to see some more games looking perfect.

The usual screenshots to end...