HEL_040 + GFX_engine_010?

RinksCustoms

I noticed that the HEL 040 is a nice tile based graphics engine, however looking to overlay the ROM font over the tiles hasprooven to be a bit frustrating. I can't locate a "offscreen_buffer". I'm guessing that the HEL doesn't use one and just reads the memory "raw"...· I have no exp in ASM unfortunately, so reading even well commented files is still a bit cryptic to me. So anyone willing to at least point me into the right direction on how to achieve this idea (or even if it's feasable with memory), i'd appreciate it lots.

To be more specific, I'd like the ability to use the ease & relative compactness of the tile engine but with added GFX_ENGINE abilities like drawing a gauge needle, ROM font at different textmodes, as well as being able to animate the colors not always on the tiles.

1. Is it possible to use the HEL engine to generate a background image, ie- a virtual dashboard, and then copy that screen image to an "offscreen__background_buffer" where the main·program uses that buffer as the background, gets coppied to an "offscreen_draw_on_buffer" where the graphics engine draws on top of the background and then copies that "draw on" buffer to an onscreen buffer? I like the idea of the tile engine being able to switch between tilemaps within one frame.

The theory - save memory with a tile engine giving the ability to switch between ALOT of screens/colors/layouts, add the abilities of the GFX engine to draw vector graphics,· use the ROM font with different textmodes. Is this possible?

2. Or just use GFX+TV / HEL_ENGINE separately - not desirable as i'd like a way to be able to "draw" on the background.

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E³ = Thought

http://folding.stanford.edu/·- Donating some CPU/GPU downtime just might lead to a cure for cancer! My team stats.

JT Cook

You are right, HEL is a pretty nice driver, but could be difficult to use for what you are trying to do. First off I think the tiles are 16x16 pixels in size, so you would need to have the font be that size as well. The palette is fixed so you can't change it on the fly, but you also do not have the color limitation so you can use any color for any pixel. Also there isn't a buffer, just a tile map. And there aren't any routines to draw images on the tiles, so it sounds like you might just be better off using what you are already using right now.

RinksCustoms

The internal ROM font is 16x16 or 16x32 (depending on the tile bit in·tv_mode in the tv driver), but the tile engine & integrated tv driver does not have support for the internal font or drawing features. It's too bad there isn't an easy way to get the tile engine to output to a global off_screen_buffer where I could then·draw ontop of that with parallax's GFX engine and then copy it to an on_screen_buffer. But after reading the HYDRA cover to cover (and perusing through a few of remi's tutorials) I've only become more confused. The nature of outputing visual data on the prop is a bit more complex than I have time to understand, generating sprite scanline buffers, and xor-not-and-or'ing for sprites which i'm not interested in implementing this go round. Don't get me wrong, the book is well laid out and explains everything you need to know to do awesome graphics on the prop, but i don't understand a lick of ASM, and due to the time constraint of the prop contest, i do not have the time to master ASM &/or multi-cog "overlay" support in less than 6 months. I still have to get the Fuel Injection up and running - literally!

I just didn't think drawing graphics/text on a background could be so complex is all.... Andre was right, the demo coders ARE Jedi knights of programmers.

Thanks any way for the help.

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E³ = Thought

http://folding.stanford.edu/·- Donating some CPU/GPU downtime just might lead to a cure for cancer! My team stats.

stevenmess2004

Have you looked at the Parallax graphics driver? It think that it does everything you want but it takes up more space. There is also a version that can use the ROM font and I'm currently working on getting Clemens font working.

AndreL

As noted, the idea of the HEL driver is for tile graphics with sprites all in one cog and relatively easy to understand (for an ASM programmer). If you want bitmapped effects then you will need a bitmap engine, or you will have to do some tricky rendering in tiles and "trick" the engine into drawing a set of say 4x4 tiles that represent your bitmap that you want to update. This is perfectly feasbile and how a lot of tile engines support animation and movement on sub-tile alignment.

Andre'