Anyone care to check something for me. . . .

[Razzie.P]

4 minutes ago, jerseystyle said:

 to hide the fact that he’s a complete jackass. 

Nah...  He's not hiding that fact at all.  😄

 

The rest of what you said seems accurate though.

[Lostdragon]

10 hours ago, Austin said:

Congrats @Lostdragon, you've made the list!

 

 

  

It would help if you actually read what they have said. Shoving your head in the sand isn't doing you any favors.

My mother will be so proud 😂

[MrTrust]

9 hours ago, TrekkiesUnite118 said:

He tries to follow actual SNES devs and tries to pay attention to what they say. But then he incorrectly assumes he can just use every single one of the things they mention all at once to solve any problem and it really doesn't work like that. There's trade offs and he completely ignores that concept.

 

I don't know, Kirk.  Sounds to me like this dude's got your number.  Do you have any actual technical knowledge of the system, or are you just piecing these things together from things you've heard?

 

Again, don't know the system.  Only know a little bit about assembly, and that's on the 6502, but none of these objections to your theories strike me as being unreasonable.

 

Whether or not the reactions to you, personally, are is another story maybe, but it doesn't look to me like they're just shitting on your ideas for the sake of it.

[KidGameR186496]

12 hours ago, Austin said:

Congrats @Lostdragon, you've made the list!

 

 

  

It would help if you actually read what they have said. Shoving your head in the sand isn't doing you any favors.

Hooray! I also made it into Kirk's ignore list XD. Get psyched Kirk X'D

[turboxray]

15 hours ago, MrTrust said:

 

What's wrong with the shadows?

 

 You can't have two layers of transparency like that. Transparency/translucency via color math only works between the sub and main screens. When you designate a layer to a screen.. the whole layer comes along for the ride. So if sprites go to the sub screen... ALL sprites go to the sub screen. And the only control about which sprites participate in color math, is by looking at sprite color palettes 0-3 and 4-7. Four of the 8 will participate in color math and the other four will not. And because all sprites on are on layer, it's impossible for a translucent sprite to appear on top of another, as translucent. 

 

15 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Well, where is he getting these ideas, then?  What makes him think that they will work?  

 He watches youtube videos. Looks at graphic effects.. knows from a high level that things like windows, hdma, layers.. exist but doesn't know anything about the details or how they really work. So he makes assumptions and guesses because that's what he's seen in videos (and the bits n' pieces people tell him).

 

 This concept of creating shapes with masks was explained to him about 8-10 months ago. Even a site link in the discussion showing it off to him. I mean, even early titles SMW did mask shapes (and scaled them). So, he's got a high-level understanding of how masks work (start and end point), but lacks the understanding of how it actually works and the limitations involved, and has gotten this mask/window stuff wrong on multiple mockup videos. But you know the saying, "even a broken clock can be right twice a day". Though somehow with Kirk, it's only once a day hahah.

 

 He just sees stuff in games (actually videos, because he doesn't really play these games), tacks on a simple change/twist, and parrots it as his own creativity. That a side though, apart for when he does get the graphic effects right, he still has no concept of performance and implementation costs. Here's a quip from his last video " at least the way it's done here using the two built-in windows plus HDMA and the backdrop colour, which is pretty low cost in this case compared to using other potential methods to achieve roughly the same result on other systems. :)". He has no clue or understanding to legit qualify this statement. Not only does he have no understanding of the impact on the performance for the SNES for this effect, he has zero context/clue/experience/etc of what it takes on other systems. Like I've said, he thinks HDMA is this magical thing that solves all issues at little-to-no performance cost. He has no idea that those some 100+ lines for the chess pieces, have two start and stop end points, and that you have to transform those coords all those coords for each line, clip as needed, and then rebuild the HDMA table values. And that just assumes he only horizontally scrolls with them. This implication of "built-in" for the context he's showing.. is not what they are; they're simple clipping/mask windows.. not meant for this. So this idea of "built-in" and "pretty low cost" is just pure bullshit on his end. It's an exploit of a simple hardware mask feature, into a more advance graphic effect, that requires some non-trivial level of design and performance-cost to implement.

 

15 hours ago, MrTrust said:

 

 

[Tanooki]

6 hours ago, MrTrust said:

 

I don't know, Kirk.  Sounds to me like this dude's got your number.  Do you have any actual technical knowledge of the system, or are you just piecing these things together from things you've heard?

 

Again, don't know the system.  Only know a little bit about assembly, and that's on the 6502, but none of these objections to your theories strike me as being unreasonable.

 

Whether or not the reactions to you, personally, are is another story maybe, but it doesn't look to me like they're just shitting on your ideas for the sake of it.

That's because he does, and the 65C816 is a variation on the 6502, a progression from that, so if you do know some assembly for that, you're probably at some level being capable of making something work on a SNES as well.  There are projects about where people have made NES games run on SNES  and that's NESTED: https://github.com/Myself086/Project-Nested

 

So yeah, it's snark, but the facts are trekkie is right and has been over this a lot, and from you just posted there, you know more, far more than Kirk does how to make SNES work than he would at this rate of goings years now harassing and belittling SNES developers to 'MAKE IT WORK' for me because ME(kirk) doesn't want to face reality or figure it out at all.  I imagine if you checked out that SNESlib package out there you could make some sense of it.

 

Also since you asked him to explain himself, expect to be added to his shit list, just as LostDragon was in the last 12 hours and he didn't do anything wrong but innocently ask much the same.

[+Biff Burgertime]

6 hours ago, MrTrust said:

 

I don't know, Kirk.  Sounds to me like this dude's got your number.  Do you have any actual technical knowledge of the system, or are you just piecing these things together from things you've heard?

 

Again, don't know the system.  Only know a little bit about assembly, and that's on the 6502, but none of these objections to your theories strike me as being unreasonable.

 

Whether or not the reactions to you, personally, are is another story maybe, but it doesn't look to me like they're just shitting on your ideas for the sake of it.

Krik's one of those people who watches YouTube videos like Retro Game Mechanics Explained's series on the SNES, which mentions all sorts of cool stuff the SNES can do. You'll often see him blurt these out in his posts. Things like 512x448 high resolution mode which was useful for text-entry menus, where higher detail was useful to make letters appear clearer (especially in Japanese). Only 1 game used it during gameplay, RPM Racing which looked like shit. Color math, which used additive or subtractive color to produce semi-transparent effects like the waterfalls in Secret of Mana. Etc etc.

Toss in some other YouTube channels about pushing hardware limits like Coding Secrets and Sharopolis, and the result is Kirk_Johnston: the authority on pushing the limits of the SNES.

 

But since he has no concept of the limitations involved in making shit run on decades-old machines, he thinks you can just mix + match all the coolest-sounding features at will. He's only experienced using game-creation tools like Game Maker on modern PCs and their comparative virtually-infinite resources. So when he'd show up in SNESdev proposing that someone makes a game with [list of every cool thing the SNES can do], only to be told by those that've actually written code for the machine that, hey, you're going to run into all sorts of problems trying to do that. They'd explain why it either wouldn't work at all, or why it'd make no sense to do it that way, and how you could achieve virtually-identical effects if done differently. He's had this bizarre fixation with background Mode 0, which allows for 4 background layers (take that, Genesis!) ...but with significant drawbacks, like way less color. As a result, most games used Mode 1 which got you 3 background layers and much more color. Whenever experienced SNES devs would point out that Mode 1 made way more sense for what he was proposing, he'd throw a fit, complaining that people were trying to dictate how he should make his game - which as time went on, he'd gradually scale back his choice of words while wasting their time with endless questions to help with his game. As it became clear no progress was being made and all the help he was given lead nowhere, he pivoted to his current "My posts are thought experiments to inspire the SNES devs of tomorrow!" model.

 

He spams his Game Maker mockups everywhere, calling them "SNES" in his Tweets & video titles, only being forthcoming about the fact that it's not SNES in video descriptions (knowing people generally don't read them). That admission is typically followed by a few paragraphs explaining that his use of Game Maker is irrelevant, as everything is "up to SNES spec" and therefore indistinguishable. Over the past couple years he's disrespected and pissed off every active member of the SNESdev community, while simultaneously showing off their creations as trophies of the SNES' supposed supremacy. One thing he loves to post is Brad Smith's video on color palette cycling. Meanwhile, the attached images show how he (iNCEPTIONAL as Kirk's known in most places) derailed Brad's (rainwarrior) thread which started a productive discussion complete with a working ROM showing his results! Somehow Kirk turned that into a showcase of his misunderstanding that SCART is merely a connector - people talk of RGB SCART for its great picture quality, but Kirk was seemingly unaware that SCART can also carry a composite signal, and was unwilling to concede his idiocy as usual. Brad basically says "hey this is my thread, please stop derailing it and make your own." Stubborn in every sense of the word, that wouldn't fly, so Brad was left to abandon his own thread and make a new one to escape the insanity.

As Kulor pointed out recently in his Rex Nobilis thread: Kirk's shown the same disrespect to him by spamming a work-in-progress GIF posted to a private community, holding it up again as a "look what the Genesis CAN'T do! trophy, despite Kulor's asking him not to. Not only are his ill-conceived efforts to "inspire" greater SNES development worthless, they're actively discouraging it. He's shown time and time again to everyone that if you wish to work on the SNES, you best be prepared for some asshole to pop up and start pestering you at every opportunity. Given how many hobbyists dedicated enough to their craft to devote the massive amount of time needed to even begin a task like SNES development seem to be introverts, I cannot think of a worse fate.

 

It's also worth pointing out that Kirk doesn't even own a SNES! He has a SNES Mini...... which lead to another of his endless misunderstandings. Games in the SNES era were meant for 4:3 screens, but he insists the internal 8:7 resolution is more correct, due to his SNES Mini having a "Perfect Pixel" display mode. See, Nintendo made this device so therefore it's official. No, it's a fucking emulator. Early SNES emulators would display video in 8:7 ratio to save on processing power, it's a holdover from that. Again, no matter how often pixel-aspect-ratio vs. display-aspect-ratio was explained, along how CRTs and technology of the era worked, he seemed to think he know better.

 

Googling "iNCEPTIONAL" + "SNES" will provide and endless well of insanity to plunge into as deep as you wish.

 

At this point he's a lone man on an island made of his own fantasy. He's alienated the entire SNES community, pissed-off anyone capable of doing the thing he claims to want most in life, and got himself booted from so many communities that he's had to resort to posting his SNES stuff in an Atari forum.

 

[Razzie.P]

1 hour ago, Biff Burgertime said:

He's shown time and time again to everyone that if you wish to work on the SNES, you best be prepared for some asshole to pop up and start pestering you at every opportunity. Given how many hobbyists dedicated enough to their craft to devote the massive amount of time needed to even begin a task like SNES development seem to be introverts, I cannot think of a worse fate.

 

 

To me, that's kinda related to what I personally feel is the worst part of what he's doing.  Imagine being a newish developer seeking information, finding this crap that can't be achieved, then getting frustrated and giving up because they failed at doing something that can't be done. 

 

He claims to wants to improve awareness and activity for the SNES development scene, but the reality is, his behavior has contributed to the opposite effect, actively turning away those with potential interest.  He wants to promote himself as some sort of expert resource while leaving false information and gets all pissy when anyone fact checks it.

 

 

[KidGameR186496]

3 hours ago, Razzie.P said:

To me, that's kinda related to what I personally feel is the worst part of what he's doing.  Imagine being a newish developer seeking information, finding this crap that can't be achieved, then getting frustrated and giving up because they failed at doing something that can't be done. 

 

He claims to wants to improve awareness and activity for the SNES development scene, but the reality is, his behavior has contributed to the opposite effect, actively turning away those with potential interest.  He wants to promote himself as some sort of expert resource while leaving false information and gets all pissy when anyone fact checks it.

 

 

Yeah, Kirk is sounding just like Kieren Hawken with his behavior...

Edited November 8, 2023 by KidGameR186496

[jeffythedragonslayer]

On 11/7/2023 at 11:57 AM, turboxray said:

and self-confessed that he can't even do simple arithmetic to calculate how many tiles fit in vram

But he can convince me to figure that out for him.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

7 hours ago, jeffythedragonslayer said:

But he can convince me to figure that out for him.

Are you aware of how pathetic you look posting stuff like this? 

[jerseystyle]

20 hours ago, Biff Burgertime said:

Krik's one of those people who watches YouTube videos like Retro Game Mechanics Explained's series on the SNES, which mentions all sorts of cool stuff the SNES can do. You'll often see him blurt these out in his posts. Things like 512x448 high resolution mode which was useful for text-entry menus, where higher detail was useful to make letters appear clearer (especially in Japanese). Only 1 game used it during gameplay, RPM Racing which looked like shit. Color math, which used additive or subtractive color to produce semi-transparent effects like the waterfalls in Secret of Mana. Etc etc.

Toss in some other YouTube channels about pushing hardware limits like Coding Secrets and Sharopolis, and the result is Kirk_Johnston: the authority on pushing the limits of the SNES.

 

But since he has no concept of the limitations involved in making shit run on decades-old machines, he thinks you can just mix + match all the coolest-sounding features at will. He's only experienced using game-creation tools like Game Maker on modern PCs and their comparative virtually-infinite resources. So when he'd show up in SNESdev proposing that someone makes a game with [list of every cool thing the SNES can do], only to be told by those that've actually written code for the machine that, hey, you're going to run into all sorts of problems trying to do that. They'd explain why it either wouldn't work at all, or why it'd make no sense to do it that way, and how you could achieve virtually-identical effects if done differently. He's had this bizarre fixation with background Mode 0, which allows for 4 background layers (take that, Genesis!) ...but with significant drawbacks, like way less color. As a result, most games used Mode 1 which got you 3 background layers and much more color. Whenever experienced SNES devs would point out that Mode 1 made way more sense for what he was proposing, he'd throw a fit, complaining that people were trying to dictate how he should make his game - which as time went on, he'd gradually scale back his choice of words while wasting their time with endless questions to help with his game. As it became clear no progress was being made and all the help he was given lead nowhere, he pivoted to his current "My posts are thought experiments to inspire the SNES devs of tomorrow!" model.

 

He spams his Game Maker mockups everywhere, calling them "SNES" in his Tweets & video titles, only being forthcoming about the fact that it's not SNES in video descriptions (knowing people generally don't read them). That admission is typically followed by a few paragraphs explaining that his use of Game Maker is irrelevant, as everything is "up to SNES spec" and therefore indistinguishable. Over the past couple years he's disrespected and pissed off every active member of the SNESdev community, while simultaneously showing off their creations as trophies of the SNES' supposed supremacy. One thing he loves to post is Brad Smith's video on color palette cycling. Meanwhile, the attached images show how he (iNCEPTIONAL as Kirk's known in most places) derailed Brad's (rainwarrior) thread which started a productive discussion complete with a working ROM showing his results! Somehow Kirk turned that into a showcase of his misunderstanding that SCART is merely a connector - people talk of RGB SCART for its great picture quality, but Kirk was seemingly unaware that SCART can also carry a composite signal, and was unwilling to concede his idiocy as usual. Brad basically says "hey this is my thread, please stop derailing it and make your own." Stubborn in every sense of the word, that wouldn't fly, so Brad was left to abandon his own thread and make a new one to escape the insanity.

As Kulor pointed out recently in his Rex Nobilis thread: Kirk's shown the same disrespect to him by spamming a work-in-progress GIF posted to a private community, holding it up again as a "look what the Genesis CAN'T do! trophy, despite Kulor's asking him not to. Not only are his ill-conceived efforts to "inspire" greater SNES development worthless, they're actively discouraging it. He's shown time and time again to everyone that if you wish to work on the SNES, you best be prepared for some asshole to pop up and start pestering you at every opportunity. Given how many hobbyists dedicated enough to their craft to devote the massive amount of time needed to even begin a task like SNES development seem to be introverts, I cannot think of a worse fate.

 

It's also worth pointing out that Kirk doesn't even own a SNES! He has a SNES Mini...... which lead to another of his endless misunderstandings. Games in the SNES era were meant for 4:3 screens, but he insists the internal 8:7 resolution is more correct, due to his SNES Mini having a "Perfect Pixel" display mode. See, Nintendo made this device so therefore it's official. No, it's a fucking emulator. Early SNES emulators would display video in 8:7 ratio to save on processing power, it's a holdover from that. Again, no matter how often pixel-aspect-ratio vs. display-aspect-ratio was explained, along how CRTs and technology of the era worked, he seemed to think he know better.

 

Googling "iNCEPTIONAL" + "SNES" will provide and endless well of insanity to plunge into as deep as you wish.

 

At this point he's a lone man on an island made of his own fantasy. He's alienated the entire SNES community, pissed-off anyone capable of doing the thing he claims to want most in life, and got himself booted from so many communities that he's had to resort to posting his SNES stuff in an Atari forum.

 

Anyone who reads that and thinks Kirk had any job within the software industry other than masturbating in a dumpster next to discarded GTA merch is, well, probably the proud “owner” of an Amico test unit.

[turboxray]

10 hours ago, jeffythedragonslayer said:

But he can convince me to figure that out for him.

Weird, but okay. I mean, hey - if his attitude and attacks on other people don't bother you, then have at it.

[Tanooki]

11 hours ago, jeffythedragonslayer said:

But he can convince me to figure that out for him.

I find that kind of sad, is it out of pity?  Given his behavior to dozens (we over a 100 yet?) people, especially those who are deep into coding if not actually in or are formerly of the industry who gets this is mindblowing why you'd back him up with that level of support.  I mean have at it, but it's not a good look supporting someone that acts in such a manner.

[Razzie.P]

8 hours ago, jerseystyle said:

Anyone who reads that and thinks Kirk had any job within the software industry other than masturbating in a dumpster next to discarded GTA merch is, well, probably the proud “owner” of an Amico test unit.

I mean... as far as jobs in game development go, that role seems pretty safe from being replaced by AI, at least.

[jeffythedragonslayer]

I ran the numbers for tiles in VRAM, anyone nice is welcome to PM me for it.

Edited November 10, 2023 by jeffythedragonslayer

[Kirk_Johnston]

On 11/8/2023 at 12:33 AM, MrTrust said:

 

WRT to that demo specifically, apparently your shadows aren't possible

The only thing I can see to even remotely call out there is the dead Goomba shadows overlapping other sprites, which is nothing more than me being lazy in GameMaker and trying to avoid writing some clunky code to get the index value of the dead Goomba object instances so I could match each shadow instance for them properly. The shadows and code on SNES would obviously not be rushed like this and that visual anomaly simply would not exist, so that little visual bug is addressed by default once coding on actual SNES by virtue of how the SNES does shadows in real practice. Notice how the player shadow, normal Goomba shadows, and block shadows, which are all done with sprites, are all behind all the fully opaque sprites and any of the 2bbp tiles too; this is how all the shadows would actually be setup in the real thing. Whatever issue raised here with the shadows is not an example of something that would make an actual working SNES version of my mockup impossible. And I also already addressed this previously in at least two of the videos for my pretty platformer mockup too, with the titles of videos containing “read description” in them to point to those details.

 

On 11/8/2023 at 12:33 AM, MrTrust said:

and your 8bpp image only allows you to fit the current frame in VRAM,

My 8bpp image fits into VRAM with plenty of room to spare, as there are basically 32 scanlines at the bottom of the image that are completely empty [minus a couple of tiles] other than some backdrop colour that is done as such to specifically to free up a bunch of the VRAM again, which would not be the case if this were indeed a full-screen 8bpp image covering all 896 visible tiles plus another 28 to allow the layer to scroll too. This is also why I specifically choose Mode 4 for this example as well, so the foreground can use the lowest memory 2bpp tiles and thus make the overall memory size even smaller. It's even why I went with the SMB tiles and sprites, because you can literally build a whole game out of just a handful of them, once again minimising the space required. This has already been addressed in my blog article going over how I would do some of this stuff.

 

But if some people want to see some [messy] numbers, here they are (this is why I choose not to do the math and programming part of making games as much as I can avoid it):

 

SNES has 64KB VRAM
8bbp tiles take up 64 bytes
If I were drawing a whole background layer of 8bpp tiles, which I am not, it would be 896 tiles at 64 bytes each, which is 57,344 KB
That would leave 6656 bytes for the tilemaps, sprites and 2bpp layer
I've been told each tile needs 2 bytes in the tilemap, so, that’s 896x2 = 1,792 bytes. 
I have two tilemaps, one for the 8bpp layer and the other the 2bpp layer, so that's 1792x2 = 3585 bytes.
6656-3584 = 3072 bytes available for the 2bbp tiles and the sprites.
The 2bpp tiles are 16KB and the sprites 32KB
If I were just using all sprites for the remainder, I would have enough room for 96 sprites (no 2bpp tiles).
If I were just using all 2bbp tiles for the remainder, I would have enough from for 192 2bpp tiles (no sprites)
So, if we mix and match the exact amount of each type to get what I need for this mockup, I am within the VRAM limits.
And the link below has an image that shows pretty much every foreground layer and sprite used in this example.

 

Now, two final considerations:

1.    I actually want to scroll the screen, so that would require considering another 28 8bpp tiles tiles vertically too. 
2.    But, as I said before, I’m not displaying a full 896 8bpp tiles on-screen. There’s actually 32 almost full scanlines at the bottom of the image on the 8bpp layer that don’t have any tiles at all and are just using the backdrop colour (actually works out to 112 tiles because I have a couple of tile blocks on those rows), so that frees up basically the same space back again. And the same would apply to the 2bpp layer. No need for messy maths as they basically cancel each other out.

 

I actually already explained much of this previously, regarding what I was doing to save space and how many 2bbp tiles and sprites I'm using and such, and I even linked to it on my blog https://inceptionalnews.wordpress.com/2023/09/09/how-my-eye-melting-snes-mockup-could-be-done/

 

On 11/8/2023 at 12:33 AM, MrTrust said:

so you will need to use HDMA/DMA channels to load the next ones,and you will probably run out of you tried to do this. 

HDMA is being used mainly for a couple of things in this demo on any given scanline, which is drawing the two window/masks and changing the backdrop colour or a bit of row scrolling. This is well within the SNES' eight HDMA channels per scanline. And there's spare channels to be used for something else if necessary.

 

On 11/8/2023 at 12:33 AM, MrTrust said:

but even if not, when would this ever be necessary for a game, and therefore what's point?

It would be necessary in a game where someone decides they want to use the 8bpp mode to display a lovely high colour background image during actual gameplay [alongside a second layer plus sprites and maybe even window/shape masks for an additional background layer alongside the gorgeous high colour one and the 2bpp one], should anyone ever decide to do such a thing, which, given this was literally never seen in any SNES game that I am aware of, might be something someone would find interesting to actually try at some point. It’s not for me to dictate what people should or should not choose to do in their own SNES games/demos, but the example is there to show a possibility and nothing more. This is the case with all my mockups; just some examples to think about for anyone who's interested. And I can tell you I have had conversations with some people who are very much interested in this kind of thing on SNES, so that's a great start.

 

On 11/8/2023 at 12:33 AM, MrTrust said:

Apparently, you have said you can't do enough simple arithmetic to even count the tiles in VRAM

Regardless of what I have or have not said in the past and the actual way it was originally conveyed and intended, and regardless of how that has been portrayed here, I think I’ve covered that enough with my example above.

 

And, as mentioned by someone else, if I really need help with the math stuff, I can ask for that. It certainly doesn't make any of my current demos or mockups impossible.

 

On 11/8/2023 at 12:33 AM, MrTrust said:

don't understand what things like HDMA actually are or how the graphics modes work in practice

I think my two literal working SNES demos show by actual design and execution that I know more than enough how to design SNES games/demos using this stuff, be it using HDMA for backdrop colour gradients, a bit of row/line scrolling down the screen, drawing window/shape masks, or whatever, and still while making sure the ideas work within the SNES limitations, as they clearly do. 

 

On 11/8/2023 at 12:33 AM, MrTrust said:

and base your demos on specs that are theoretical. 

I have provided two literal working SNES demos that were directly built as specifically detailed in my theories and mockups along with the notes and instructions I provided to the programmers, so if the theory is the same when executed, it still works. This was also one of my theories that I proposed in SNESdev a while back too, and when eventually tested by one of the SNESdev programmers out of pure curiosity [not due to anything I asked him to do directly], it also worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LAY4ulp63Y Therefore, I think the actual results show my understanding of the SNES' technical capabilities is certainly good enough for me to state with confidence that, yes, the stuff I'm proposing is possible.

 

So, if you go all the way back to your original question, I have now answered that and also addressed the other points that I asked you to bring forward too.

 

If there are any normal human errors in what I've written above, none of them mean my mockup(s) are impossible on SNES. Other than some possible minor nitpick niggles and maybe the kind of stuff most people actually playing the end games don't care about and likely wouldn't even notice in most cases, say a bit of flicker once in a while or something like that, what you see is possible on SNES.

Edited November 10, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[MrTrust]

What did you pay the guy who wrote the code for those demos?

[Wayler]

1 hour ago, Kirk_Johnston said:

Other than some possible minor nitpick niggles

Maybe your cancerous approach to human interaction?

[TrekkiesUnite118]

3 hours ago, Kirk_Johnston said:

My 8bpp image fits into VRAM with plenty of room to spare, as there are basically 32 scanlines at the bottom of the image that are completely empty [minus a couple of tiles] other than some backdrop colour that is done as such to specifically to free up a bunch of the VRAM again, which would not be the case if this were indeed a full-screen 8bpp image covering all 896 visible tiles plus another 28 to allow the layer to scroll too. This is also why I specifically choose Mode 4 for this example as well, so the foreground can use the lowest memory 2bpp tiles and thus make the overall memory size even smaller. It's even why I went with the SMB tiles and sprites, because you can literally build a whole game out of just a handful of them, once again minimising the space required. This has already been addressed in my blog article going over how I would do some of this stuff.

 

But if some people want to see some [messy] numbers, here they are (this is why I choose not to do the math and programming part of making games as much as I can avoid it):

 

SNES has 64KB VRAM
8bbp tiles take up 64 bytes
If I were drawing a whole background layer of 8bpp tiles, which I am not, it would be 896 tiles at 64 bytes each, which is 57,344 KB
That would leave 6656 bytes for the tilemaps, sprites and 2bpp layer
I've been told each tile needs 2 bytes in the tilemap, so, that’s 896x2 = 1,792 bytes. 
I have two tilemaps, one for the 8bpp layer and the other the 2bpp layer, so that's 1792x2 = 3585 bytes.
6656-3584 = 3072 bytes available for the 2bbp tiles and the sprites.
The 2bpp tiles are 16KB and the sprites 32KB
If I were just using all sprites for the remainder, I would have enough room for 96 sprites (no 2bpp tiles).
If I were just using all 2bbp tiles for the remainder, I would have enough from for 192 2bpp tiles (no sprites)
So, if we mix and match the exact amount of each type to get what I need for this mockup, I am within the VRAM limits.
And the link below has an image that shows pretty much every foreground layer and sprite used in this example.

 

Now, two final considerations:

1.    I actually want to scroll the screen, so that would require considering another 28 8bpp tiles tiles vertically too. 
2.    But, as I said before, I’m not displaying a full 896 8bpp tiles on-screen. There’s actually 32 almost full scanlines at the bottom of the image on the 8bpp layer that don’t have any tiles at all and are just using the backdrop colour (actually works out to 112 tiles because I have a couple of tile blocks on those rows), so that frees up basically the same space back again. And the same would apply to the 2bpp layer. No need for messy maths as they basically cancel each other out.

 

I actually already explained much of this previously, regarding what I was doing to save space and how many 2bbp tiles and sprites I'm using and such, and I even linked to it on my blog https://inceptionalnews.wordpress.com/2023/09/09/how-my-eye-melting-snes-mockup-could-be-done/

 

Here's the problem with that math. The smallest tilemap you can have on the SNES is 32x32 which is exactly one 256x256 screen. So having 2 of those at 2048 bytes each would be 4096 bytes. Next you are scrolling horizontally. For this to work smoothly you need more tiles horizontally than screen resolution so you have space off screen to update the tiles. With a tilemap of 32x32 you don't have that when using 8x8 tiles, which you are using since your tiles are 64 bytes each. So you need to increase your tilemap size. The next size you can go to on SNES is 64x32. So now your tilemaps are 4096 bytes each. So with 2 of those you're at 8192 Bytes for your tilemaps for both layers. Combine that with the 896 8bpp tiles and you're out VRAM, and you haven't even gotten to your sprites and 2bpp tiles yet.

 

Just because you don't use a full screens worth of tiles doesn't mean you don't need to define them in the tilemap. The tilemap still needs to be defined there to tell the system to draw no tiles there. Otherwise it will just interpret whatever data is there as tilemap data and try to draw what ever it interprets that as.  But oh well, let's just say screw it and and chop off the bottom rows of tiles and hope we never have to scroll vertically, that would free up about 2KB of space. Thats a very tight fit. You might just be able to fit your 2bpp tiles int here and your Alucard and Goomba sprites, but that's it. Better hope you never need to have another enemy type on screen and that you never need to have more than one frame of animation at a time.

 

Sure if you use less 8bpp tiles as you said you can free up some more space, but now you have something that's even worse looking than it already was, especially since your 2bpp tile layer does nothing to try and mask it. At the end of the day this is a complete waste  and no one would ever do this. Is it really worth doing all this just to have a fraction of a toystory picture behind Alucard in SMB1? You can get something far better looking with the 4bpp modes and not have to do this constant VRAM dance.

 

3 hours ago, Kirk_Johnston said:

HDMA is being used mainly for a couple of things in this demo on any given scanline, which is drawing the two window/masks and changing the backdrop colour or a bit of row scrolling. This is well within the SNES' eight HDMA channels per scanline. And there's spare channels to be used for something else if necessary.

With your chess pieces I'm guessing you'd need to use at least half the channels to do that. If I'm following correctly you'd be using 2 windows for when there's 2 chess pieces on screen, and you'd need 2 channels per chess piece. The gradient would also take 2 I think? The point is more that you're using 3/4 of your HDMA channels for something pretty worthless.

 

3 hours ago, Kirk_Johnston said:

 

I have provided two literal working SNES demos that were directly built as specifically detailed in my theories and mockups along with the notes and instructions I provided to the programmers, so if the theory is the same when executed, it still works.

 

You didn't make them, and they're glitchy messes on real hardware.

Edited November 10, 2023 by TrekkiesUnite118

[jerseystyle]

On 11/8/2023 at 8:57 PM, jeffythedragonslayer said:

But he can convince me to figure that out for him.

What’s the color of the jar you’re kept in, and how close is it to Kirk’s sobbing closet?

[MrTrust]

2 hours ago, TrekkiesUnite118 said:

But oh well, let's just say screw it and and chop off the bottom rows of tiles and hope we never have to scroll vertically, that would free up about 2KB of space. Thats a very tight fit. You might just be able to fit your 2bpp tiles int here and your Alucard and Goomba sprites, but that's it. Better hope you never need to have another enemy type on screen and that you never need to have more than one frame of animation at a time.

 

This is the crux of the thing, isn't it?  I tried his ROMs on an emulator; not really sure what the Mario one is supposed to be demonstrating, but the ice river thing looks like pretty complex parallax to me, but I have no idea what kind of gameplay is possible with this engine.  

 

2 hours ago, TrekkiesUnite118 said:

s it really worth doing all this just to have a fraction of a toystory picture behind Alucard in SMB1?

 

Isn't part of development for old systems making them do new things just for the sake of it?  I don't see what's the harm in that.

 

2 hours ago, TrekkiesUnite118 said:

You didn't make them, and they're glitchy messes on real hardware.

 

This is the other crux of the thing.  How much of the result is him, and how much is whoever he got to write the code?  If he paid the guy and it was a work-for-hire sort of situation, I would say he's entitled to take the credit regardless.  Otherwise, this strikes as very weird; he's trying to be like a project manager for demoscene programs.  

 

I don't get it; he strikes me as not being all that knowledgeable about coding in general, but he's clearly not dumb.  There should be no real reason that he couldn't learn to do these things for himself.  Seems like he put way more effort into this, and only getting these two little demos out of it, than he would just knuckling down and learning asm.

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

1 hour ago, MrTrust said:

 

This is the crux of the thing, isn't it?  I tried his ROMs on an emulator; not really sure what the Mario one is supposed to be demonstrating, but the ice river thing looks like pretty complex parallax to me, but I have no idea what kind of gameplay is possible with this engine.

The main thing is just to show bog standard mode 0 on the SNES just for the sake of going "SNES can do 4 layers, Genesis and PC Engine can't!"

 

There's nothing novel or special about it. He's trying to claim its some revolutionary thing when it's not. Most criticism from it is more aimed at the fact that those demos could be done with less layers thus letting you use Mode 1 and have more colors.

 

1 hour ago, MrTrust said:

Isn't part of development for old systems making them do new things just for the sake of it?  I don't see what's the harm in that.

Sure, but again he's not really making it do anything new or novel. Technically he's not making the SNES do anything since these are all game maker demos. He's just throwing a bunch of stuff together just to go "look SNES better than Genesis and PC Engine!" without any real thought of if it makes sense, is viable for a game, or if the SNES can actually handle doing all of those at once.

 

1 hour ago, MrTrust said:

This is the other crux of the thing.  How much of the result is him, and how much is whoever he got to write the code?  If he paid the guy and it was a work-for-hire sort of situation, I would say he's entitled to take the credit regardless.  Otherwise, this strikes as very weird; he's trying to be like a project manager for demoscene programs.  

 

I don't get it; he strikes me as not being all that knowledgeable about coding in general, but he's clearly not dumb.  There should be no real reason that he couldn't learn to do these things for himself.  Seems like he put way more effort into this, and only getting these two little demos out of it, than he would just knuckling down and learning asm.

At the end of the day it's not about actually making a game, pushing homebrew, helping the community, etc. He doesn't want to actually make something himself. He just wants the homebrew community to make demos for him to use in YouTube and Twitter arguments.

 

At the end of the day all he cares about is "winning" a console war no one has cared about for 30 years. When you realize that, your patience for him drops to zero.

Edited November 10, 2023 by TrekkiesUnite118
Typos

[M-S]

6 hours ago, Kirk_Johnston said:

But if some people want to see some [messy] numbers, here they are (this is why I choose not to do the math and programming part of making games as much as I can avoid it):

 

SNES has 64KB VRAM
8bbp tiles take up 64 bytes
If I were drawing a whole background layer of 8bpp tiles, which I am not, it would be 896 tiles at 64 bytes each, which is 57,344 KB
That would leave 6656 bytes for the tilemaps, sprites and 2bpp layer
I've been told each tile needs 2 bytes in the tilemap, so, that’s 896x2 = 1,792 bytes. 
I have two tilemaps, one for the 8bpp layer and the other the 2bpp layer, so that's 1792x2 = 3585 bytes.
6656-3584 = 3072 bytes available for the 2bbp tiles and the sprites.
The 2bpp tiles are 16KB and the sprites 32KB
If I were just using all sprites for the remainder, I would have enough room for 96 sprites (no 2bpp tiles).
If I were just using all 2bbp tiles for the remainder, I would have enough from for 192 2bpp tiles (no sprites)
So, if we mix and match the exact amount of each type to get what I need for this mockup, I am within the VRAM limits.
And the link below has an image that shows pretty much every foreground layer and sprite used in this example.

 

Kirk, are you saying the reason why you have never wrote a line of SNES code is because of these extremely basic math operations? They aren't messy, there are no square roots or logarithms and everything is divisible by 2. The fact the numbers are big means nothing, calculators can do that.

And you can't just keep asking people to do the work for you, nobody is going to make a game and put you in the credits. Think about the time you spend making mockups and doing these pointless discussions on forums, it must take at least 1 hour everyday. Imagine if you spend that time learning SNES assembly through videos, it's not even in years, in months you could learn how to program games, just can't be lazy and scared of math. 

 

[KidGameR186496]

11 minutes ago, TrekkiesUnite118 said:

The main thing is just to show bog standard mode 0 on the SNES just for the sake of going "SNES can do 4 layers, Genesis and PC Engine can't!"

 

There's nothing novel or special about it. He's trying to claim its some revolutionary thing when it's not. Most criticism from it is more aimed at the fact that those demos could be done with less layers thus letting you use Mode 1 and have more colors.

 

Sure, but again he's not really making it do anything new or novel. Technically he's not making the SNES do anything since these are all game maker demos. He's just throwing a bunch of stuff together just to go "look SNES better than Genesis and PC Engine!" without any real thought of if it makes sense, is viable for a game, or if the SNES can actually handle doing all of those at once.

 

At the end of the day it's not about actually making a game, pushing homebrew, helping the community, etc. He doesn't want to actually make something himself. He just wants the homebrew community to make demos for him to use in YouTube and Twitter arguments.

 

At the end of the day all he cares about is "winning" a console war no one has cared about for 30 years. When you realize that, your patience for him drops to zero.

Yup, pretty much. The console wars ended years ago, but some people (Even in the current homebrew scene) want to presume what their system can do compare to other consoles instead of, i don't know, make a fun title to enjoy on a dead platform.

 

Kirk, if You want to be a productive force in the SNES homebrew scene, learn how to code in Assembly using the PVSNESLib, instead of complaining to other devs about making a GameMaker equivalent on SNES and attacking them for not making your "SNES" demos work on real hardware. It's not gonna happen anytime soon.

 

Maybe that way you'll become a SNES homebrew programmer, instead of being a counter-productive member of the SNES community. But since You have me on your ignore list like so many other AtariAge members, you won't care in the slightest and You prefer being in your bubble where you seem to know everything SNES related stuff compared to actual and more knowledgable SNES homebrew coders.