Author Topic: Ti-Boy Grayscale  (Read 5345 times)

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Offline thepenguin77

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Ti-Boy Grayscale
« on: April 18, 2011, 11:08:57 pm »
Now, I've never actually played Ti-Boy (I should) but I know that the grayscale is not as good as it could be graphics wise. The reason why Ti-Boy can't get great grayscale is because it uses all of the cpu time emulating games. But I think I have found a way to make it work really nice.

For my Chess game, (which people have said has perfect grayscale,) I refresh the screen between 59-61 times per second. Of course the user adjusts this because every calculator is different. And 60 fps takes a pretty big toll, that's 50% of the cpu time. But, another option is to refresh the screen at 30 fps and still match the refresh rate. So essentially, write to the screen buffer, let it get displayed twice then update it again. This method gets some minor scan lines, but it's consistent; there's no flicker.

So to Calc84:
I don't know how you do your grayscale. But if you are using interrupts, make a two stage cycle. Using the crystal timers, make the first stage a static length of 172 at speed $40 (10923Hz) When this interrupt comes back, don't do anything. Then send out a second interrupt of user adjusted length default at 172. When that comes back, update the screen and repeat.

Of course I don't know if this sort of thing is feasible, but if it is, you'll have people talking about how good the grayscale looks :D. (If you get really desperate, you could even refresh at 20 fps, but I don't know how that would look)


Here's a demo to show what I'm talking about:
+ and - adjust delay, 2nd displays delay, and clear quits
« Last Edit: April 18, 2011, 11:10:05 pm by thepenguin77 »
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Offline calc84maniac

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Re: Ti-Boy Grayscale
« Reply #1 on: April 18, 2011, 11:13:19 pm »
I cannot use interrupts at all. I simply update the screen 3 times per rendered game boy frame.
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Offline thepenguin77

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Re: Ti-Boy Grayscale
« Reply #2 on: April 19, 2011, 09:22:57 pm »
Oh, haha, darn. I thought I was going to have two breakthroughs in one day.
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Ti-Boy Grayscale
« Reply #3 on: May 25, 2011, 04:27:40 pm »
In other words this is kinda like Axe grayscale you are using, right, calc84maniac? :P

Offline calc84maniac

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Re: Ti-Boy Grayscale
« Reply #4 on: May 25, 2011, 04:32:49 pm »
In other words this is kinda like Axe grayscale you are using, right, calc84maniac? :P
Pretty much, yeah. :P

(Nice necropost by the way :D)
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Ti-Boy Grayscale
« Reply #5 on: May 25, 2011, 04:45:48 pm »
Lol I just was late on checking new posts. It's hard to go through 20000 posts in 2 months O.O (I pretty much ignore half of the threads now, especially spam/misc/comp help)