minkster said:
what exactly does hardware framebuffer do? i never realy understood what it does for n64 games
The framebuffer is a part of RAM in a computer allocated to hold the graphics information for one frame or picture. This information typically consists of color values for every pixel (point that can be displayed) on the screen. A framebuffer can either be:
- off-screen, meaning that writes to that memory don't appear on the visible screen,
- or on-screen meaning the memory is directly coupled to the visible display.
extracted from glide64 readme.txt:
"N64 games often use auxiliary frame buffers to implement special game effects
like motion blur or for optimization purposes. The console can allocate as many
auxiliary frame buffers as needed and then use them as usual textures. PC video
cards usually use only one buffer for rendering, thus emulation of frame buffer
effects is always a hard problem. The usual method of emulation, which
theoretically should always work, is to render auxiliary frame buffer into main
video buffer and then read it from video memory into main memory and put into
the structure representing N64 memory (RDRAM)."
"Hardware frame buffer emulation is in fact a hack - auxiliary frame buffers
are not put into N64 memory. When a game uses texture located in area in RDRAM
corresponding to auxiliary frame buffer, the plugin uses texture located in video
memory instead. The game may use this area in RDRAM for different textures
later, but the plugin will use it's auxiliary buffer anyway, which leads to
serious glitches. I (Gonetz) have tried to reduce probability of this situation, but it
is still possible. If you encounter it, switch to windowed mode, and then back
to full screen again."
read n64 manual for futher info
