Quick Jump Daily Digest

**MSeven** · 08-30-2006, 06:00 PM

I usually steer away from posting work-in-progress updates; I like raw releases - in spite of that, this article provides some interesting insight towards the development & debugging process taken to further optimize the fantastic emulator which we call Daedalus! StrmnNrmn has been putting in some serious work and continuing to improve his N64 emulator, as proven by the recent release of Daedalus R8.

Some of the hardest problems to identify and fix are various graphical issues that crop up when running certain roms. Sometimes it’s unhandled combiner modes (this is what results in the purple-and-black textures seen in so many screenshots). Other times there are black or white polygons, or scrambled textures and so on. Sometimes the screen is just totally black :)

When I’m trying to figure out what’s causing a particular problem my first step is to recompile Daedalus with the Display List Debugger enabled. If you’ve been playing with the source, this is done by setting CFLAGS = $(DEBUG_DLIST_CFLAGS) in the Makefile, and linking in Source/PSPGraphics/DisplayListDebugger.o.

The debugger is accessed by pausing emulation and hitting the right trigger button. You need to have PSPLink set up in order to use it, as I didn’t want to clutter up the display with various debbuging output. When the debugger is activated, it keeps the emulator paused and replays the current display list over and over. The first thing is does is dump out a list of all the commands in the display list to a logfile which looks something like this (I’ve edited it somewhat to create a simple example):

…if we still have your attention, check out the full article here.