Re: Tools

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Pierre Phaneuf wrote:
> 
> ...Voodoo3 hardware seems to be the biggest bang for the buck, mostly
> lacking in the visual departments (only 16 bit and picture always
> look too dark with the 3Dfx chipset, dunno why).

It looks dark because you don't have the gamma set up right.

Tweak the shell variables that deal with gamma (I forget what they
are called for Voodoo-3) and all will be well.

The problem with Voodoo cards in general are:

  * 16 bit textures
  * 16 bit colours
  * 16 bit Z
  * Limit of 256x256 for texture maps.
  * Poor texture coordinate resolution - resulting in
    texture 'shimmer' when the number of map repeats gets
    large.

> Yes, knowing assembler is important, and even with todays compilers,
> sometimes you have to use assembler. For example, we have a sound mixer
> for Quadra (no threads, no sound server process, doesn't skip or lag!)
> that adds the samples together and then uses if's and whatever to
> properly clip it.

That's exactly what I have in PLIB - and use on my Tux game.

> This is a good case that could be replaced with
> assembler. 

But is it?  My code is in C++ and consumes less than 1% or the CPU on my
266MHz PC - and only 7% on my ancient 66MHz 486. (That's playing three
22KHz samples - each with pitch and volume modified on-the-fly and then
mixed together)

There is no way I'd rewrite that in machine code to save just a half
percent of the CPU...especially since I'd then have to make it work
for Alphas, Mac's, MIPS, PPC's, etc.

Machine code is pretty much dead.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
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