MooglyGuy's Shoddily-Put-Together N64 WIP Page - May 2007 Entries

05/28/2007 - Pokemon

To update on the update below, I'm making some headway in getting the RDP Probe to run on real hardware. As a test, I've duplicated the command sequence sent by Super Mario 64 when it makes the entire framebuffer white for the span of a frame just after powerup. In MESS it works like a champ, holding on a steady white frame. When run on a Nintendo 64, it actually displays something this time; the only problem is that it does so with epilepsy-inducing flashing, only displaying white every other frame. Go figure.

More annoyingly, I removed the actual Fill_Rectangle command from the command sequence and tried feeding it in in RDP Probe mode rather than hard-coding it, and the screen flashes black instead. Even if I issue a Set_Fill_Color command immediately before the Fill_Rectangle command, the damned thing keeps flashing black. On an arguably more annoying note, the X coordinate seems offset by about 128 pixels to the right. Which is to say drawing a rectangle at 192.0, 0.0 - 256.0, 240.0 ends up appearing on the very left side of the screen instead. Honestly, Nintendo, what the hell.

I'm going to bed. It's not like this stuff is going to run away while I'm asleep.

05/27/2007 - Reality Dismay Processor

The first pass of the RDP Probe is in. You manually enter 64-bit words, specify how many words comprise the packet, and press Z to turn RDP activity on and off.


Entering a packet - Fill_Rect: 8.0, 136.0 - 312.0, 232.0


The packet itself.

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work on a real N64 just yet. I'm probably not setting something up quite right such that MESS is happy but a real N64 isn't. It's not that the N64 crashes or anything, it just doesn't display what the RDP should. I'll have to look into that.

05/22/2007 - Alzheimers

With the majority of the parts in place for the probe, it took me only a couple hours to put together the memory editor portion of HIPTHRUST. Check it out.

The main title screen:


The memory editor itself - hmm, this data looks familiar.


Hey, this looks like 1bpp 8x8-pixel font data!


Aww, now they're little smiley faces. HOW ADORABLE!


Enough of that, let's check out the RDP Probe.

Whoops. Looks like I need to get back to work.

If for whatever reason you want to give this a whirl in your own emulator, grab it right here, and don't hesitate to drop me a line to tell me what you think!

Apparently, it also works on a real N64.


It's a Cinderella moment - the shoe fits! Now I shall marry the Prince.


This is the previous font-modification screenshot, but with 0 replaced with a brick pattern instead. Hooray!

05/22/2007 - Pieces of Flair

The last essential part, a button, has been created.

Two simple buttons:


One lets you select a state for the second button:


The other brings up a simple OK dialog:


05/21/2007 - Current Events

The List part now supports the appropriate events as well as scrolling. Additionally, I have reworked the window priority system such that the windows are drawn in the appropriate order and inputs are passed to the appropriate screens. The general ruleset is that windows with the top priority are given inputs (this means multiple windows can potentially get input), and windows are drawn from the bottom layer to the top. In the screenshot below, we have 3 windows: Layer 0 Priority 0, L1P0, and L2P0. If I were to add a screen at L3P1, that screen would subsequently get exclusive input.



Incidentally, if you want to give the most recent UI test rig a try just for kicks, grab it here and have fun. As much fun as you can have scrolling in a vertical list. Yeah.

05/21/2007 - Making A List, Checking It Twice

The List part is up and running in a basic state, though it lacks a few things such as OnChanged (focused item has changed) and OnPressed (A button pressed) events and scrolling at the moment.



At this point I'd say we're only about one or two parts plus a few engineering tweaks away from being able to actually work on the probe itself. Which is nice.

05/20/2007 - Grab Bag

A mish-mash of info on what I've been doing to keep myself occupied in the past few days, outside of working 12-hour days. Small wonder I only work in short bursts on this stuff.

As you can see, I've got a lot on my plate to share across the free time left over while working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Bear with me as I get my, erm, bearings.

05/14/2007 - Multiplicity

Now multiple windows can coexist. I've also created a TextQueue part, which maintains a queue with as many lines as the part's height, with each line being as wide as the part. When a line is inserted when the queue is full, it scrolls up and inserts the line at the bottom. Observe:



If you happen to have a cart copier for the N64, feel free to download the test program here and try it out yourself. You're welcome to try it on MESS or any other emulator, but it likely won't work - in the former case because my local modifications haven't been submitted to the mainline yet, and in the latter case because most emulators still use godawful black-boxing of the RSP's functionality. Enjoy.

05/13/2007 - Gutenberg

The TextField UI element is now done, supporting three wrap modes: no wrap (will always render to one line, regardless of the part's height), character wrap (will wrap to the next line upon hitting the part's width), and word wrap (will wrap to the next line if the next space would be past the part's width).

05/12/2007 - On British Pastimes

I'm in the process of adding a bunch more functionality to the input system, and in the process came to the conclusion that I probably want to limit the maximum number of enqueued input events. I figure 8kbytes is a decent enough limit, as each event is currently 16 bytes in size, which gives us a limit of 512. It occurred to me as I was typing up the relevant #define that we shouldn't ever hit even that ballpark figure. It would take a lot of doing to enqueue 512 separate button presses and analog stick updates faster than they could be processed. Not wanting to abandon the notion of a limit altogether, I added this glorious comment:

// If we EVER hit this many events queued, the program has probably crashed anyway
#define EVENT_QUEUE_LIMIT 512

 A bit cynical? Sure, but it's amusing to look at. And that's what's important.

05/12/2007 - Push Button, Receive Bacon

After a partial text-system rewrite to support color text and the creation of a more user-friendly input-handling system, we get this:



I should probably make a copy of this to send to Ville, too, since it provides a decent method for seeing precisely how the analog stick handling is broken in MESS.

At any rate, I'm bordering on engineering overkill for HIPTHRUST. I want to provide a decent user-interface experience, even if it is in ASCII, so my primary temptation is to create a decent UI framework so as to make the program extensible. We'll see, I suppose.

05/11/2007 - Toxie

Much like a loser slathered in toxic waste, the RSP probe begins its rebirth into HIPTHRUST:



It doesn't seem like much, but it means that my text-draw and box-draw functions are working properly - and that's the foundation of any sort of user interface, isn't it?

Rather than putting everything in main() and haphazardly calling sprintf and VI_DrawText, I've designed a text module that maintains what amounts to a tilemap for the entire screen. Rather than having to maintain a separate character buffer to store lines to display, the text module takes care of that by implementing pprintf - positioned printf - such that you can write arbitrary arglists to the screen. Hooray!

It looks like I have the entire weekend off for a change, so I expect to either be hammering away at the first feature - memory editing - or working on making the remaining ARM opcodes pass the ARM Wrestler suite so that the preliminary GBA driver in MESS can work better.

The Mog out.

05/08/2007 - Public Lewdness

I've always wanted to give a program of mine a decently amusing name. Hence, I have decided to name my up-and-coming N64 test rig HIPTHRUST: Highly-Integrated Probe Tool Haphazardly wRitten for Ultra Sixty-four Tests. This has the benefit for opening the door for such potential future tools as GRaphics Interrogator for NintenDo 64 (GRIND), General Audio & Sound Probe (GASP), and Relative OPcode Evaluator (ROPE).

For posterity, the other self-made entries that were rejected were:
TETANUS: TEst Tool and Agent for Nintendo Ultra Sixty-four
THRUSH: Test Harness wRitten for Ultra Sixty-four Hardware

Speaking of the tool, I spent most of my time after work (the entire hour of it) modularizing the original RSP Probe code and making it generally more readable. Going progressively forward to results!

05/08/2007 - The Right To Bear ARMs

Thanks to the helpful functionality of a little homebrew GBA program called ARM Wrestler, over the past couple nights I've managed to make all of the THUMB instructions pass the tests ARM Wrestler performs in THUMB mode. There are still plenty of ARM-side issues that will have to work out, but for now I'm reasonably happy. Unfortunately, there are a number of opcodes that ARM Wrestler does not actually test, so those will have to be ironed out as time goes on. Anyway, it's not N64-related, but don't crucify me - it takes a lot less time to hammer out an opcode or two in a night than it does to write a specific test harness for a given RSP instruction, compile it, burn it to a disc, and let it run for 8 hours!

Sub-Entry for 05/08/2007: Get Real

A good friend of mine directed me to this little gem of a message-board thread. It would appear that someone has ported MESS's implementation of the RDP into a separate N64 emulator plugin. Impressively enough, it runs pretty much everything amazingly well, which in turn implies that the vast majority of remaining video issues in MESS's N64 driver are related to the RSP. As if I needed more pressure on me. Not that I have anything to worry about, either from the kiddiez or from Nintendo - it isn't 1998 anymore. Unfortunately, there are a handful of nay-sayers in the thread, including another N64 video plugin author, Rice, who claims that LLE is pointless, and that HLE does everyting perfectly already. Oh well.

05/04/2007 - Does Whatever A Spider Can

Tonight I went to see Spiderman 3 with a number of coworkers, and it ended up being quite amazing. It was a lot more touching than either of the previous movies, so that's a plus. It has a number of amusing scenes, which is another plus. About the only downside is that it cements the notion of wanting to bear Tobey Maguire's children, because he is just that damn awesome.

In the realm of more "vintage" cinematic outings, I wholeheartedly recommend Blood Sucking Freaks. While neither a high-budget film nor a particularly accurate film in terms of terminology, lifestyles, or physiology, it has all the hallmarks of classic trashy Troma flicks that we've all come to know and love. Really, you don't see this movie because it's any good, you see it for the sake of appeasing a cinematic masochism streak.

Wait, what? What was I talking about?

Oh, right. Nintendo 64-related things.

Well, things are currently at a standstill in terms of active development, but I expect that they'll pick up again in about a month or two. When I'm not working 12-hour days. Priorities, you see. In the meantime, I've been occupying myself with various fantasies of what I plan to code when I get the chance, and I have a few good ideas. Namely, I've been thinking of writing a complete test tool for the Nintendo 64 hardware. As it is currently planned, the test tool will have the following features:
If you have any suggestions for other features that would be useful to you in divining the behavior of the Nintendo 64's hardware, let me know at moc.liamg@yugylgoom (reversed, obviously).

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