Recent content by TapamN

It's definitely impressive and has great artwork, but it's worth noting that the ROM is 50% larger than Super Mario World or Sonic the Hedgehog 1, at 768 kilobytes. If someone tried to release this in the 80s, they'd have to bring the ROM size down (or sell the game for more than $100). It's...

The PVR can handle compressed non-square textures if you don't use mipmaps. If there's a requirement that a non-mipmapped texture must be square when compressed, that's an engine/file format problem. I know the official .PVR texture file format has very limited support for small codebook...

I can't find any hard evidence for that, besides a bunch of people repeating something someone else said. I'm looking for either actual pictures of a motherboard, or well researched documentation, like from homebrewers or official Sony docs. From what I can find, the motherboard used for the...

After looking at pictures of various models of motherboard, I can't find any evidence of a PS2 where CPU+GPU+RAM was combined into a single chip. It looks like they had combined CPU+RAM with separate GPU at the end.

Yes. A byte is 8 bits. For the PS2's main RAM, 32 megabytes is 32*1024*1024*8 = 268,435,456 bits large. With DRAM, at one transistor per bit, the transistor count would be about 268M. For the PS2 GPU's EDRAM, at 4 megabytes, the transistor count would be 4*1024*1024*8 ~= 33.5M. It was the "8...

Huh? That link is almost exactly what I said. You were saying there were 8 transistors per bit in DRAM

I'm pretty sure DRAM is typically one transistor (and capacitor) per bit. SRAM is often 6 transistors per bit. Both require extra control circuitry for things like address decoding or buffering that would also need to be factored in, but I don't know much extra that is. It would depend on the...

To me, it looks like Saturn Shenmue uses static gouraud shading to help increase the color depth of 4 bit textures. There's definitely no realtime lighting, though. I could have sworn I read somewhere that someone from AM2 said that Saturn Shenmue ran on a stock, unupgraded Saturn, but I can't...

I was expecting Sega's Last Survivor to at least be mentioned, which did a similar 3D maze made out of sprites a few years earlier, but no.

Asian Dynamite is what happens when you have more experienced artists and REALLY take advantage of the extra 8MB of video RAM the Naomi has over the DC. There's a ludicrous number of 512x512 and 1024x1024 textures. Sega seemed strangely hesitant to heavily use texture compression the majority of...

Baking lighting allows for higher quality lighting. Depending on how the T&L code is written, there's not much difference between a single parallel light and baked in terms of speed, but the baked could look a lot better. The raw polygon counts for some rooms seem like they might be hard to...

The first section of Emerald Coast is 27K tris, the static map data in City Escape is around 120K polygons (doesn't include props like plants), and the Crazy Taxi maps are around 200k polygons.

I don't think this is the first time I've seen them say that the Sega Model 2 and 3 didn't use mipmaps. They both do, and they even use trilinear filtering with detail texture support, but they have a heavy bias to push the LOD switching point far back (like using a 32x32 level when you would...

Frame rate analyses cherry pick problem areas so they have something interesting to show. I've played Shenmue and Shenmue II to completion on real hardware with real GD-ROMs multiple times. The majority of the game is 30 FPS. I don't know enough about the PSP to really compare it to the...

More than 90% of the game is 30 FPS. There are a few areas that have problems, but those are seem to be caused by the lack of mipmapping, which can cause a huge penalty to GPU performance. I do homebrew dev for the Dreamcast, and I've seen rendering without mipmapping run slower than with...