Home Page Forums Archives Zinc (DEV) Future Mac OS X port?

Something must have mixed up in my brain then.
Anyway new gfx cards are not that expensive and someone who wants to play games for free should spend a few bucks and get something decent.

Aye, but all our iMac and Mac Mini using friends are stuck with the video card that comes with their machine; it's not upgradable.

Almost certainly, while the interpreter does work it's not endian agnostic & IIRC it doesn't work with every game. Might be easy to fix up, when you can find the issues :-)

smf

Oh, I only need feedback, if somebody finds a real emulation error, and has a fix for it.

Of course, if a porter has cleanly added his changes to the existing code base, using #ifdefs or whatever, his changes are welcome, and I will add them gladly to the sourceforge project.

But if a porter just hacked up the sources to run on his hardware, I prefer it that he releases this source by himself, kthanx


Well, you obviously cannot simply activate the usual texture filtering with your shader (or only if you are in for some psychedelic color effects).

And to calculate the interpolated fragment color yourself in your shader... you'll need the
weighted average of surrounding texels, okay, but which ones? How to calculate the needed texel coords? And how to realize enough dependant texture reads on ATI cards? nanana.... forget it.

A good RGBA texture cache is not easy to code, and it can even run faster than real palettized textures (or a palette shader), since it doesn't cause gfx card stalls by uploading texture data (the palette colors) all the time.

Of course, there is this one special case you have mentioned:

True, true. If lotsa palette changes are happening to many of the used textures, a texture cache is borged... ah, well, nothing is perfect

Nevertheless, it's just as arekkusu has stated: if somebody wants to code an hw/accel psx gpu plugin, which should be able to run on as many cards as possible (and still with a good speed), he cannot use pal. textures or pal. shaders, he has to develop a good texture caching algorithm, imho.

Or maybe you could have an even smarter texture cache that recognises that some textures are using color cycling and handle that through pixel shaders or something

Of course, with PSX GPU I think that current plugins are more than adequate after years of development

RB: would be nice to see if ZiNc is able to run 100% on a MAC mini... How fast/slow does MAME run ZN games on that platform ?

Arbee,

Appreciate the points you made earlier. However, I'm interested to know whether or not you've had any further (informal) chances to look into the feasibility of a Mac port?

Thanks for your time.