SoftGraphic graphic plugin

[the_randomizer]

The plugin is not showing up in the drop-down box. I placed the plugin from the extracted SoftGraphic_v1.2.0 in the plugins plugin, but the sodding thing won't show up. WTF?

[GPDP]

Originally Posted by nintendo1889

The plugin is not showing up in the drop-down box. I placed the plugin from the extracted SoftGraphic_v1.2.0 in the plugins plugin, but the sodding thing won't show up. WTF?

Working fine on my end. Try deleting the previous version first, then placing the new one in the folder.

Got a nice speed boost from this latest update by the way. I get full speed with Super Mario 64 inside the castle, using FatCat's HLE RSP plugin and suanyuan's HLE audio plugin on my i7 860, with the filter disabled. It drops down to around 40 VI/s in big open areas, but still, a good solid step. Here's to hoping further optimizations are possible.

As the plugin progresses, would it be possible to add more resolution options? I would love to get this working at 1280x960.

[the_randomizer]

Originally Posted by GPDP

Working fine on my end. Try deleting the previous version first, then placing the new one in the folder.

Got a nice speed boost from this latest update by the way. I get full speed with Super Mario 64 inside the castle, using FatCat's HLE RSP plugin and suanyuan's HLE audio plugin on my i7 860, with the filter disabled. It drops down to around 40 VI/s in big open areas, but still, a good solid step. Here's to hoping further optimizations are possible.

As the plugin progresses, would it be possible to add more resolution options? I would love to get this working at 1280x960.

The old version was never in there in the first place, 1.2 was the only version I downloaded.

Edit: Never mind, found out why. Derp. The framerate isn't too bad all things considered (I've hit 40-45 fps in most games). Considering that this is only the third release, that's rather impressive, and the games that had missing transition effects (like F Zero X) now appear as they do on real hardware. Keep up the good work.

[dsx_]

Originally Posted by FatCat

Actually what happens is that when the filter is off, anti-aliasing and some coverage effects are disabled. When the filter is on, it's not really "blurry", just that the dithering of the textures is concealed by the anti-aliasing, interpolation etc. effects.

As you can see the real N64 screenshots have anti-aliasing and hide the dotted dithering you're referring to, so I don't see how that's part of the issue. It's what the plugin does when filtering is not disabled.

I guess it's just me, I just think that the dots are ugly, e.g. in the top right of the world driver screenshot, the light blue dots on dark blue, which would look better and make more sense if it was a solid dark blue.

And yeah I kinda forgot that the n64 has a bilinear filter (fairly sure it doesn't have AA though) so I see why my comparison is pointless. Just wanted to show what I meant by the "pattern"

Originally Posted by angrylion

Turning off VI filters, by the way, is completely inaccurate. It's pointless to compare images captured from an emulator that skips VI filters / coverage / other important RCP behavior to the ones taken from hardware.

Not sure what you mean, but if we're going for accuracy of the original console, bilinear filtering should be used in the plugin I guess

[HatCat]

Yes it's called dithering.

If, on a small color palette, you have no orange color, you "dither" red and yellow pixels by each other.

Quick image I made to show VGA 4-bit palette dithering on MS-DOS (orange, purple).
Not the most convincing orange and purple, but it's all you could do with such small color palettes.
Plus, when you downscale the image, it becomes a very, very convincing orange and purple.
It's one of the ways animated GIFs are formatted if they are saved with too many colors.

So if you think about it logically, N64 gfx (which for 3-D triangle texturing tend to use 16-bit textures, not 32-bit) will have some degree of dithering in native low-res gfx, that are covered up by filters. Bi-linear filtering, according to Glide64 methods, is one filter you could use, but anti-aliasing, coverage and dithering are all discussed at least as thoroughly in the RDP documentation. So the fx do exist.

Remember that just because Glide64 does not show a particular effect (e.g. anti-aliasing), does not mean the effect doesn't exist. Thanks to angrylion's research I found out that the native frame buffer screen resolution calculation in Glide64 was actually incomplete/wrong. Glide64 is generally known to be the least orthodox of all the gfx plugins, though in doing so also strives to be the most internally accurate for a HLE plugin.

[HatCat]

Or, maybe you were trying to compare to z64gl.

Some notes by ziggy:
http://www.emutalk.net/threads/40640...l=1#post386184

Note particularly that he acknowledges that the N64 uses some anti-aliasing:
"One thing that I know need to be improved, but I haven't work out yet , is the emulation of coverage. The RDP handles antialiasing in a particular way, some informations called "coverage" is stored in the framebuffer (but most of it isn't actually available to the programmer, because it's stored in "hidden" bits of the memory of the N64 (bits normally used for CRC)) Some effects rely on this coverage processing being precisely emulated. This point is my top priority, but it's a delicate problem : emulating it exactly with a 3D card isn't really an option, so instead it requires to find a trick to get a similar result but still allow to use 3D acceleration."

[Zera]

I get this dithering even with the filter on. That's why I asked if a 32-bit render was possible as a future implementation earlier, it fixes it on PSX games at least.

[angrylion]

These dithering patterns look the same on my real N64, e.g. black smoke coming from karts in Diddy Kong Racing, message boxes in Star Fox 64 intro, etc. The only difference is that the CRT (or component cables) makes them a little less pronounced. What you want is a PAL/NTSC filter/shader, not some changes to the renderer.

[mudlord_]

should be very easy to add if all you are doing is rendering a software rendered quad.

[dsx_]

I didn't mention Glide64, but okay

So dithering is caused by a small colour palette? I thought the n64 could show millions of colours