My Air Buster/Aero Blasters demo (MSX+V9990) | MSX Resource Center (Page 2/2)

Master (165)

15-01-2023, 11:07

New video of my V9990-powered Air Buster. The first stage is more fleshed out now, with two layers of buildings when the city comes in. And there's also the X68000 building. ;)

Par Latok

msx guru (3938)

15-01-2023, 16:14

Looks really good!

Par PingPong

Enlighted (4138)

15-01-2023, 17:10

At minute 1:05 there is a glitch on the top of the screen approximately on first top 24 pixels .... is the beam catching some vram update.

Par pizzapower

Master (165)

08-04-2023, 22:30

New video running the Air Buster demo on the real hardware. Colour bars now display how much time is spent in each routine in the frame. The buildings corrupting at the end of the video is already fixed in my current code.

Even if it seems to be mostly the same demo, code under the hood has changed a lot. I am using now VDP acceleration through blitter commands whenever possible. Lots of things that were in RAM before are now stored in VRAM (like foreground and background tile maps), so now the blitter can move them around faster.

I am now using SDCC 4.2.0 exclusively and SDCCCALL(1) along with it when possible. So I have been replacing some of Fusion-C and G9klib code with code of my own to speed things up when necessary. And when I run the code in OpenMSX I can use the profiler too for a better assessment of performance.

Par aoineko

Paladin (1002)

08-04-2023, 23:04

Nice work pizzapower.
What V9990 mode are you using?
To what corresponds the light-green border which takes about 80% of the frame?

Par pizzapower

Master (165)

08-04-2023, 23:29

aoineko wrote:

Nice work pizzapower.
What V9990 mode are you using?
To what corresponds the light-green border which takes about 80% of the frame?

Thanks. The demo uses P1 mode, which is quite similar to what Air Buster arcade uses. The green light border is waiting for the vblank.

I have changed the meaning of the colour borders since the video. It means this currently:

BLACK = copying sprite attributes to VRAM (124 of them)
RED = updating all tiles (FG and BG)
YELLOW = reading input
BLUE = processing game physics
GREEN = waiting for vblank