𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️

Dad, gearhead, video game historian, software/retro dev, hacking culture cultivator and a nerd at heart. About in this order. @ertesx @nokia_ngage

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

I am happy to announce my latest project: N-Gage SDK.
An ecosystem for developing (or porting existing) games for the Nokia N-Gage using modern tools such as Visual Studio 2019/2022 and CMake: https://t.co/xWecOIYVGG

[The Nokia N-Gage Discord @nokia_ngage]

🚨 BREAKING: Nokia N-Gage support has officially been merged into SDL3. Yes, the N-Gage!

Meanwhile, Dreamcast devs still arguing over VMU font rendering.
Snake > Sonic? 🐍📱 > 🌀💿

#SDL3 #NGage #RetroDev #DreamcastCopium

https://t.co/tH63PwIMVW

[Carter T Schonwald @cartazio]

@mupfdev @ertesx @Everteverest @shapr @Conversus1 @mstk He was a very nice open source internet weirdo

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

Annual reminder: this month marks seven years since we lost @ertesx
Hardly a day goes by without us thinking of you.

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

Annual reminder: this month marks six years since we lost @ertesx. Rest in peace, my dear friend.

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

Just a heads up, I'm moving to @bluesky. It's such a nice and non-toxic environment, full of great people. I'll post from time to time via @nokia_ngage, but that's it. See you there! 🤓

https://t.co/NPio4FeQxL

[Jonas Eschenburg @indyjonas]

This is a VoxelSpace renderer running on a 1MB, 8MHz, 16-color Atari ST. Lots of optimization went into this project written mostly in C and inline m68k assembly. Most recently, use of the CRT was reduced, making the executable only 13430 bytes small, freeing almost 200KB of RAM.

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

@JadeLombax Hahahaha, love it. 🌮

It's now called open8 and we decided to keep it portable after all.

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

After struggling through the maths API, I'm finally getting started with the graphics API. However, PRs are still very much welcome and encouraged. So if you want to make a small contribution towards #Pico8 emulation on the Nokia N-Gage, I won't stop you. 🙃 #NGageSDK #RetroDev

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

@falco_girgis

[Falco Girgis @falco_girgis]

Holy SHIT, I just figured out a way to directly HW accelerate Renderware's "decorated" Matrix type and eliminated the need for constant matrix format conversions in our Sega Dreamcast port of Grand Theft Auto 3!

In the top-left is my modified version of the main RW matrix structure. It encoded a 4x3 matrix within the layout of a 4x4 matrix, where 3 elements of the final column were just left as uninitialized padding while the top element was used to encode metadata "flags" within the matrix.

These flags were quite useful in that they encoded whether the matrices were in certain forms, allowing for various optimizations such as skipping transforms against an identity matrix or taking a fast path for an inverse...

While this Frankenstein matrix format was fine with linear algebra routines being implemented in vanilla C, which can easily skip the padding and flags, it presented a real goddamn problem with HW accelerating the math via SIMD instructions.

Now suddenly an intermediate conversion was necessary to go from the "decorated" matrix format to the "raw" matrix format, before it could be crammed into SIMD instructions... which was less than ideal.

So... I came up with a crazy-ass idea that would allow me to DIRECTLY use the decorated matrices with the DC's SH4 CPU SIMD instructions...

Since the SH4 instruction, FTRV (which can do a whole 4D vector transformed by a 4x4 matrix), is just an approximation, it turns out that at least a few of the least significant bits within the elements of the vector and matrix operands are simply ignored... which means... WE CAN SCOOT THE GODDAMN FLAGS TO THE END OF A FLOAT ELEMENT AND PASS THEM TO OUR SIMD INSTRUCTIONS WITH THEM GETTING SAFELY IGNORED!

So now, as you can see on the right, we can replace the slow-ass C software routines with fast SH4-accelerated intrinsics which use the FTRV instruction, by simply changing the padding to proper identity matrix values plus abusing the 3 least significant bits of element [0][3] to store our flags!

So now RW matrices are basically native DC 4x4 SIMD types... and we got some pretty handsome gainz (plus a few FPS in high FPS areas) to show for it!

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

@tsoding Check this out, you might enjoy it: https://t.co/EvOxMNJw2o

[DarkPath Studio @NekoEye]

This is Dreamcast!💪 I haven't had much time for Spiral Engine lately, but its development continues, and it can do things like this, shadows on animated objects. 😁 #dreamcast #gamedev #retrocomputing

[Ryan C. Gordon @icculus]

SDL 3.2.6 is out! https://t.co/uyk3vccSlS

So a small detail in this release is mjpeg camera support. This turned out to be an interesting feature.

[Falco Girgis @falco_girgis]

Today's Grand Theft Auto 3 micro optimization for the Sega Dreamcast... speeding up vertex transformation by approximating perspective division.

On the DC's SH4 CPU, a single-precision FDIV instruction takes a whole 13-14 cycles to execute. Ain't nobody got time for that shit, so we can abuse the builtin floating-point reciprocal square root approximation instruction (FSRRA) and a couple multiplications to perform a much faster, approximate division with an unsigned result ("MATH_Very_Fast_Invert()").

It turns out that for our PowerVR GPU, which requires clipping all polygons intersecting the camera's near Z plane, we never even need a negative result with a perspective divide, so this is an immediate win. You can see us using the "MATH_Very_Fast_Invert()" macro directly for the vertex submission routines on the right.

For other scenarios where we'd like to be slightly better than a real FDIV, where we only need an approximate result, but we MUST preserve the sign of the value we're inverting, "MATH_Fast_Invert()" takes exactly as many cycles as an FDIV in isolation; however, other instructions can be get scheduled in with the routine when it gets inlined for better superscalar dual-dispatch utilization, plus the resulting value is able to be accessed by a later instruction in the pipeline earlier with this routine than with a full FDIV.

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

@SebAaltonen You worked on a best-selling game using the Symbian S60 API. No punchline.

[Wario64 @Wario64]

Command & Conquer source code available on Github https://t.co/0OJETBLRMF

Command & Conquer Archive Footage from Renegade and Generals https://t.co/bgY18XYWz7

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

@AskurOdinson Die ist bzw. war freiwillig zugelassen. Meine Simme ist das auch. Das ist initial aufwändig, spart aber Kosten in der Versicherung. Kann zudem auch saisonweise zugelassen werden, lohnt sich aber kaum. Das komplette Jahr kostet mich bei der HUK ca. 20 Euro.

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

Custom built Hercules MP4-632 from 1979. Almost finished.

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

z8lua by @samhocevar in ANSI C. You're welcome. 🤓🤗

https://t.co/5WL8azGNXc

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

Here are some first impressions of my PICO-8 emulator for the Nokia N-Gage. I'm getting somewhere, but there's still a lot to do!

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

The more I get involved with Pico-8, the more I start to appreciate it. fillp() was surprisingly straightforward to emulate. Why? Because almost everything in Pico-8 is just that: simple by design. #NGageSDK @nokia_ngage

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

After struggling through the maths API, I'm finally getting started with the graphics API. However, PRs are still very much welcome and encouraged. So if you want to make a small contribution towards #Pico8 emulation on the Nokia N-Gage, I won't stop you. 🙃 #NGageSDK #RetroDev

[𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚎𝚕 𝙵𝚒𝚝𝚣𝚖𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 🏴‍☠️ @mupfdev]

FYI: You don't need a Nokia N-Gage or an emulator. The API tests are intended to run on PC.