Just a short update of what I have been up to after throwing opengl into the bin :-).
First I started out building a small demo for the vectrex – after all, programming the thing and using vide is always the best testing. I did some small steps, using vecci intensivly and also fixing some bugs.
As you can (not) see, I tried adding a “hidden line” (rotating) cube – which works quite well.
Originally I intended to add “hidden line removal” as a feature to vecci, but at the moment I have doubts whether I really should.
I have the algorithms sorted out and tested, the only things is: vecci is a vector tool. In order to do a propper hidden line removal one has to define “surfaces” of some kind (or “faces” or whatever you would like to call it). After all – behind a line nothing can be hidden. This means I must provide some functionality for surfaces in vecci or planes, or whatever. And at the moment I doubt that this kind of change really is such a good idea. Anyway – I postponed working further on that particular subject.
For the demo I also added a mod file and a ym converted file.
One thing lead to another and I found quite a few things which I did not like about the mod-routines. So – I changed them and in between did a documentation of the BIOS sound routines, mostly concerning what the ADSR and TWANG parameters really do in relation to vectrex sound.
The mod playing routine changed a little bit, so it now supports:
- “true” silence for all channels (before it was kinda faked and sometimes non working)
- added a ADSR and TWANG table for each channel – I don’t really know why the developers didn’t do that from start – using the same settings for all seems a bit “monoton”
- added a configurable default speed (many songs were played to fast without changing the resulting sources)
- with adding different TWANG settings for each channel, the twangs for different channels do not have different rollover timers anymore
- and some other bugfixings
Right in the same direction goes the “instrument” editor.
With that you can “on screen” develope ADSR and TWANG parameters and changes. You can also listen to the settings you edited. Although for some reason the editor “sound” is still slightly different from the vectrex sound.
Well there is always more that can be done :-).
Hehe, one last thing I did as a fun exercise – I built a Vide-BIOS:
Bye for now…
Excellent 🙂 If I may play devil’s advocate and suggest that if you did implement hidden line removal, you could look into full .obj loading in vecci? It’s a simple format to parse natively without having to bring in any libraries. Having tried just relying on edges I have eventually reached a point where I need faces so have implemented this (though not in Java) for an upcoming Vectrex demo.
Also there are a few cheaty ways to do hidden line removal without a concept of faces 😉
I probably will go back to hidden lines.
If you have done something in that direction and would like to share you are more than welcome :-).
(see contact information…)
Is that the obj-format you are talking about:
http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/obj/
Nearly 3000 lines of documentary does not on the first viewing suggest an easy implementation!