Emulation Upscale internal Resolution for 3D games?

[Deleted User]

Ok, just signed up.. plan on staying in the long term for various reasons..
but that's completely beside the forum topic

I was wondering if there's a way to Upscale the internal resolution in an emulator like VBA (obviously in an unofficial fork since it natively doesnt support anything other than magnification filters) without just resizing the window.. i mean like.. you know what Desmume X432R is right? it upscales 3D games, so i was wondering if there was a similar thing for GBA.. for the 3D games like Mario Kart Super Circuit?


Is it possible?




not all that new to the homebrew community I've been around on the PSP homebrews,and the Original Xbox .. and i tiny bit on 3DS (i keep finding out the exploits after there's an update so it always gets ruined...).. just haven't signed up.

 

[FAST6191]

Many GBA emulators will have some quite nice filters for scaling when it comes to it.

Anyway the GBA did not have proper 3d hardware -- the closest it had was a mode7 a like option ( http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/mode7.htm ) and not all 3d games on the GBA used it (especially not the isometric ones). Someone over on romhacking.net was having a look at super monkey ball a little while back, I do not know how far they have since got but it might make for some interesting reading rather than the maths of the stuff above or hardware talk of things like http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#gbalcdvideocontroller
If you are looking more at the actual first person games I am not sure why (most were nice enough ports of old games or less than stellar ties ins like ecks vs sever) but to each their own.

To that end it would probably be a lot of effort and be done on a game by game basis rather than the DS approach you mention which "just" required a bit more creative interpretation of data that already existed.

I am tempted to mention the PS1 at this point and why you do not often see it there but it is not actually all that relevant to the GBA (the PS1 very much had 3d hardware and even used it with 2d games, it was just very odd compared to a lot of things).

 

[pasc]

I'd say as far as 3D Engines on the GBA go.... Apex Designs stole the cake with "Payback". That game appears to use one of the most advanced 3D Engine on the handheld.

 

[Deleted User]

i remember watching a video once of a 3d example being displayed on actual hardware, it ran at 2 or 3fps i think.. not all that good.. i was wondering why there weren't any actual 3d games for the gameboy, since it is also a 32 bit console along with the ps1 (as far as i know.. it is)



this is the 3d test

 

[NicEXE]

i remember watching a video once of a 3d example being displayed on actual hardware, it ran at 2 or 3fps i think.. not all that good.. i was wondering why there weren't any actual 3d games for the gameboy, since it is also a 32 bit console along with the ps1 (as far as i know.. it is)



this is the 3d test

This is just a demo. Demos usually push system's capabilities to the limit. You can be sure it doesn't use any official SDK to do that.

slightly unrelated but cool to watch/see how it works: http://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/

 

[TecXero]

i remember watching a video once of a 3d example being displayed on actual hardware, it ran at 2 or 3fps i think.. not all that good.. i was wondering why there weren't any actual 3d games for the gameboy, since it is also a 32 bit console along with the ps1 (as far as i know.. it is)

this is the 3d test

32bit doesn't inherently mean it's 3D capable. The hardware simply wasn't designed for it. Don't judge a console by its bits, the more you look at it, the more you realize that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of the console, as there are other, far more severe, bottlenecks determining what it's capable of.

 

[Deleted User]

This is just a demo. Demos usually push system's capabilities to the limit. You can be sure it doesn't use any official SDK to do that.

slightly unrelated but cool to watch/see how it works: http://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/

that is quite interesting.. i feel like it triggered people to make it work on emulators xD just to stump the application

 

[FAST6191]

What others have said, however if we are sharing demos now

 

[Deleted User]

What others have said, however if we are sharing demos now

wow.. i am not sure if that cube square thing at around 0:30 is but it looks like it has some sort of parallax mapping or something, but it looks quite good for the GBA

 

[NicEXE]

that is quite interesting.. i feel like it triggered people to make it work on emulators xD just to stump the application

Eh... If you check on how some stuff work on that demo you will realize that an accurate emulator won't reproduce the same output unless you also want to write an analog screen emulator too.

 

[AdamN]

i remember watching a video once of a 3d example being displayed on actual hardware, it ran at 2 or 3fps i think.. not all that good.. i was wondering why there weren't any actual 3d games for the gameboy, since it is also a 32 bit console along with the ps1 (as far as i know.. it is)

Because GBA doesn't have a real 3D hardware, imagine a computer without OpenGL/Direct3D and rendering need to be done by software (CPU) pixel by pixel (just like old DOS games), but in GBA case it's done per scanline.

Since there isn't a standarized 3D API/syscall on GBA, most games are using their own implementation to render 3D by handling the VBlank/HBlank events, which is affected by display resolution (which is known to be a constant number to GBA games), so it's difficult to implement internal texture upscaling without making it specific for each game and you will also need to know how each game renders the 3D.

 

[Lakum]

Ok, just signed up.. plan on staying in the long term for various reasons..
but that's completely beside the forum topic

I was wondering if there's a way to Upscale the internal resolution in an emulator like VBA (obviously in an unofficial fork since it natively doesnt support anything other than magnification filters) without just resizing the window.. i mean like.. you know what Desmume X432R is right? it upscales 3D games, so i was wondering if there was a similar thing for GBA.. for the 3D games like Mario Kart Super Circuit?


Is it possible?




not all that new to the homebrew community I've been around on the PSP homebrews,and the Original Xbox .. and i tiny bit on 3DS (i keep finding out the exploits after there's an update so it always gets ruined...).. just haven't signed up.

GBE+ is in development it would be able to replace original low resolution tiles with high resolution tiles. This is the closest to what you want but of course someone will have to create replacement graphic packs for games first. There is also HDNes for NES.
https://github.com/shonumi/gbe-plus/wiki/Project-Goals
https://github.com/mkwong98/HDNes
http://www.emutalk.net/threads/55446-new-super-mario-hdnes!

 

[Deleted User]

GBE+ is in development it would be able to replace original low resolution tiles with high resolution tiles. This is the closest to what you want but of course someone will have to create replacement graphic packs for games first. There is also HDNes for NES.
https://github.com/shonumi/gbe-plus/wiki/Project-Goals
https://github.com/mkwong98/HDNes
http://www.emutalk.net/threads/55446-new-super-mario-hdnes!

GBE+ looks promising, although still in early development... i want to see what MK super circuit would look like with enhanced textures bookmarking the links for when in om my pc