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Devil Lu Linvega's posts Post Back to profile
Devil Lu Linvega

Every week, I figure out more of the missing blocks to have Hiversaires running on #uxn.

I'm not there yet, but I found a scheme to create a single oversized rom containing all the assets of game and unpack them on load to make them usable.

For games like Oquonie or Hiversaires, which have large assets, I'd like to still distribute a single .rom file, I'm not interested in having like 10 "disks" in a zip file sort of deal.
9 Jul 2022 at 3:03 | Open on merveilles.town
16 comments
Yiming Wu ✅ Use OurPaint

@neauoire interesting... How is this game able to run? It looks 3d, does uxn have this sort of graphical API too?

9 Jul 2022 at 6:41 | Open on mastodon.art
Job

@neauoire I have some notes for ideas for compression in embedded contexts that I have been wanting to write out properly but haven't found the time for. Would you be interested? Maybe that bit of extra motivation is all I need

9 Jul 2022 at 7:47 | Open on vis.social
Devil Lu Linvega

@vanderZwan I'd love to read, but I don't think I'll do more than use nametables as compression.

9 Jul 2022 at 15:02 | Open on merveilles.town
Job

@neauoire Nametables as in nesdev.org/wiki/PPU_nametables? So tile maps, basically?

My ideas involve a few LZ77 variants, which should complement that quite easily

9 Jul 2022 at 16:19 | Open on vis.social
Devil Lu Linvega

@vanderZwan yeah, just indexes to tiles in a spritesheet, and to use Varvara's color byte to handle duplicate tiles that are found in memory but that are flipped x/y.

9 Jul 2022 at 16:20 | Open on merveilles.town
Job

@neauoire Ok, I'll try and write out the ideas I had in a coherent fashion and then you can tell me if I succeeded at the coherent bit (whether or not you have a use for them is an entirely different concern)

9 Jul 2022 at 16:23 | Open on vis.social
Devil Lu Linvega

@vanderZwan in any case, maybe someone else can make use of them.

In this case, I think you'd have to be somewhat familiar with the uxn sprite format.

9 Jul 2022 at 16:44 | Open on merveilles.town
Job

@neauoire That's true :)

wiki.xxiivv.com/site/formats.h right? I've read through the docs before, just haven't written something in uxn myself yet.

I don't see a reason why LZ77 based compression wouldn't likely help here. There's a reason LZSS-variants are common on NES and GB/GBA/DS devices nesdev.org/wiki/Tile_compressi

9 Jul 2022 at 16:52 | Open on vis.social
Devil Lu Linvega

@vanderZwan I can't really load pages right now, but I'll have a look when our connection gets a bit more stable.

9 Jul 2022 at 17:00 | Open on merveilles.town
exit-b

@neauoire I’m not very familiar with uxn, but maybe something like ROM banking in Game Boy - part of the address space can refer to one of a couple switchable memories.

9 Jul 2022 at 9:00 | Open on mastodon.sdf.org
Devil Lu Linvega

@exitb Since we have a file system, we can do better than that :)

9 Jul 2022 at 15:02 | Open on merveilles.town
Kira, cozy autumn fox 🦊
Devil Lu Linvega

@tty This is the test I did:

I have a 90kb rom, of which only 64kb is the program space, what I do is read the rom file with the file device, until I reach the end of the rom data, then I drew a picture that was stored at that location to the screen.

It's a bit clunky right now because I must know the name of the rom, which is a bit fragile, but if I can find a way around that, I might be able to package roms with lots of assets as a single rom.

9 Jul 2022 at 15:21 | Open on merveilles.town
Andy Alderwick

@neauoire @tty re: “I must know the name of the rom, which is a bit fragile”, that could be an excellent choice for the meaning for a zero-length filename in the upcoming File device.

9 Jul 2022 at 15:54 | Open on merveilles.town
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