dogeymon said:
I have been overjoyed ever since the Picodrive update fixed that unsightly tearing problem. All the games run perfectly.
But the tearing problem still exists with the AlexKidd, NES, PocketSNES, TG16, and such emulators. Can't they do the same treatment to those that they did to the Picodrive??
It is not simply a matter of Fixing a tearing issue. It is a matter of reprogramming your graphics engine for the emulator you use. GPH in all their excellence have created a good handheld but yet again have screwed up by rotating the screen the wrong way. As I understand it the screen originally is actually a portrait mode screen that has been fitted to function in the Wiz as a landscape oriented screen. So the updates of the screen are performed in a different way. Like the scanlines in old CRT TVs.
This causes problems as almost all the emulators out there are optimized for a landscape oriented screen and framebuffer. The software of the Wiz solves that by doing the rotate but this causes tearing, because of the way the screen is set up.
So in order to make things work without tearing on the Wiz you need to rotate the emulators screen output in a smart way....
Options:
- Rewrite your emulator's tile engine so that it accommodates the portrait framebuffer so there's no tearing whatsoever
- Plot the screen using the emulator's standard code but add a software rotate before plotting the screen in native portrait mode
- let the device handle the rotation in OpenGL
Option 1 is a huge task in most cases....
Option 2 is used but slows down the emulator and diminishes framerates as CPU power is needed to convert each frame before plotting it.
Option 3 could be really fast but no -one has used it yet (I think.... )
Your use of 'they...' implies a uniform group of people responsible for the graphics on the Wiz - well in case of the mentioned emulators in your post this is not a uniform group but individual programmers. 'They' may opt to fix it or 'they' may not. ;-)
Cheers, from a rudimentary programmer from the Netherlands....