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• SNES Hardware Compression

  16 juin 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  I was browsing the source code for some Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulators recently. I learned some interesting things about compression hardware. I had previously uncovered one compression algorithm used in an SNES title but that was implemented in software.

  SNES game cartridges — being all hardware — were at liberty to expand the hardware capabilities of the base system by adding new processors. The most well-known of these processors was the Super FX which allows for basic polygon graphical rendering, powering such games as Star Fox. It was by no means the only such add-on processor, though. Here is a Wikipedia page of all the enhancement chips used in assorted SNES games. A number of them mention compression and so I delved into the emulators to find the details :

  • The Super FX is listed in Wikipedia vaguely as being able to decompress graphics. I see no reference to decompression in emulator source code.
  • DSP-3 emulation source code makes reference to LZ-type compression as well as tree/symbol decoding. I’m not sure if the latter is a component of the former. Wikipedia lists the chip as supporting "Shannon-Fano bitstream decompression."
  • Similar to Super FX, the SA-1 chip is listed in Wikipedia as having some compression capabilities. Again, either that’s not true or none of the games that use the chip (notably Super Mario RPG) make use of the feature.
  • The S-DD1 chip uses arithmetic and Golomb encoding for compressing graphics. Wikipedia refers to this as the ABS Lossless Entropy Algorithm. Googling for further details on that algorithm name yields no results, but I suspect it’s unrelated to anti-lock brakes. The algorithm is alleged to allow Star Ocean to smash 13 MB of graphics into a 4 MB cartridge ROM (largest size of an SNES cartridge).
  • The SPC7110 can decompress data using a combination of arithmetic coding and Z-curve/Morton curve reordering.

  No, I don’t plan to implement codecs for these schemes. But it’s always comforting to know that I could.

  Not directly a compression scheme, but still a curious item is the MSU1 concept put forth by the bsnes emulator. This is a hypothetical coprocessor implemented by bsnes that gives an emulated cartridge access to a 4 GB address space. What to do with all this space ? Allow for the playback of uncompressed PCM audio as well as uncompressed video at 240x144x256 colors @ 30 fps. According to the docs and the source code, the latter feature doesn’t appear to be implemented, though ; only the raw PCM playback.

• Anomalie #2332 (Nouveau) : Critère {id_parent} dans boucles RUBRIQUES

  15 septembre 2011, par marcimat -

  Hop, en ce moment (SPIP 3.0.0-alpha2 SVN [18529]) la page ?exec=plan est en erreur, il y a une récursion infinie sur les rubriques provenant du critère id_parent inopérant lorsqu’il est seul. Mettre dans prive/squelettes/inclure/plan-rubriques.html : id_parent=#ID_RUBRIQUE et tout rentre dans (...)

• Salty Game Music

  31 mai 2011, par Multimedia Mike — General

  Have you heard of Google’s Native Client (NaCl) project ? Probably not. Basically, it allows native code modules to run inside a browser (where ‘browser’ is defined pretty narrowly as ‘Google Chrome’ in this case). Programs are sandboxed so they aren’t a security menace (or so the whitepapers claim) but are allowed to access a variety of APIs including video and audio. The latter API is significant because sound tends to be forgotten in all the hullabaloo surrounding non-Flash web technologies. At any rate, enjoy NaCl while you can because I suspect it won’t be around much longer.

  After my recent work upgrading some old music synthesis programs to user more modern audio APIs, I got the idea to try porting the same code to run under NaCl in Chrome (first Nosefart, then Game Music Emu/GME). In this exercise, I met with very limited success. This blog post documents some of the pitfalls in my excursion.

  
  
  

  Infrastructure
  People who know me know that I’m rather partial — to put it gently — to straight-up C vs. C++. The NaCl SDK is heavily skewed towards C++. However, it does provide a Python tool called init_project.py which can create the skeleton of a project and can do so in C with the '-c' option :

  ./init_project.py -c -n saltynosefart
  

  This generates something that can be built using a simple ‘make’. When I added Nosefart’s C files, I learned that the project Makefile has places for project-necessary CFLAGS but does not honor them. The problem is that the generated Makefile includes a broader system Makefile that overrides the CFLAGS in the project Makefile. Going into the system Makefile and changing "CFLAGS =" -> "CFLAGS +=" solves this problem.

  Still, maybe I’m the first person to attempt building something in Native Client so I’m the first person to notice this ?

  Basic Playback
  At least the process to create an audio-enabled NaCl app is well-documented. Too bad it doesn’t seem to compile as advertised. According to my notes on the matter, I filled in PPP_InitializeModule() with the appropriate boilerplate as outlined in the docs but got a linker error concerning get_browser_interface().

  Plan B : C++
  Obviously, the straight C stuff is very much a second-class citizen in this NaCl setup. Fortunately, there is already that fully functional tone generator example program in the limited samples suite. Plan B is to copy that project and edit it until it accepts Nosefart/GME audio instead of a sine wave.

  The build system assumes all C++ files should have .cc extensions. I have to make some fixes so that it will accept .cpp files (either that, or rename all .cpp to .cc, but that’s not very clean).

  Making Noise
  You’ll be happy to know that I did successfully swap out the tone generator for either Nosefart or GME. Nosefart has a slightly fickle API that requires revving the emulator frame by frame and generating a certain number of audio samples. GME’s API is much easier to work with in this situation — just tell it how many samples it needs to generate and give it a pointer to a buffer. I played NES and SNES music play through this ad-hoc browser plugin, and I’m confident all the other supported formats would have worked if I went through the bother of converting the music data files into C headers to be included in the NaCl executable binaries (dynamically loading data via the network promised to be a far more challenging prospect reserved for phase 3 of the project).

  Portable ?
  I wouldn’t say so. I developed it on Linux and things ran fine there. I tried to run the same binaries on the Windows version of Chrome to no avail. It looks like it wasn’t even loading the .nexe files (NaCl executables).

  Thinking About The (Lack Of A) Future
  As I was working on this project, I noticed that the online NaCl documentation materialized explicit banners warning that my NaCl binaries compiled for Chrome 11 won’t work for Chrome 12 and that I need to code to the newly-released 0.3 SDK version. Not a fuzzy feeling. I also don’t feel good that I’m working from examples using bleeding edge APIs that feature deprecation as part of their naming convention, e.g., pp::deprecated::ScriptableObject().

  Ever-changing API + minimal API documentation + API that only works in one browser brand + requiring end user to explicitly enable feature = … well, that’s why I didn’t bother to release any showcase pertaining to this little experiment. Would have been neat, but I strongly suspect that this is yet another one of those APIs that Google decides to deprecate soon.

  See Also :

  • I eventually got a second wind and made this work using the C interface.