Hello
prevost, welcome to DKC-Atlas!
Don't worry about the bump. I'm glad you're checking in with the project and getting me to post here.
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Most work is going into the NitroGUI engine, as it is going the be the supporting infrastructure that will underlie DELTA v0050. After NitroGUi is "completed" to a degree that it's usable, I can get down to finishing building the physics engine in DELTA (and that physics engine is darn complicated, mind you).
Most recently I wrote several (around 23) optimized drawing routines, and there are variants of the 7 basic modes that need to be put together (copy and paste, really). The variants allow drawing with a pixel "bit mask" while also ignoring Magic Pink as being transparent, at the same time. They will be
very useful in DELTA, but have little bearing in the actual interface.
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At the moment I'm researching graphics display techniques to see if I can speed the graphics up. Generating the stuff to draw onscreen is blazing fast, but
actually drawing it to the screen (which consists of a single memcopy from RAM to VRAM) is taking an unnecessary amount of time. It seems to be similar to the frame rate problems that DELTA had earlier, except that it only happens in windowed mode. Of course this is a moot point for GUI program, but since NitroGUI will be underlying DELTA, I'd like it to run decently in windowed mode (for obvious reasons). However I have feeling that not much can be done about the windowed mode speed decrease at this point -- it will
always be more optimal to run DELTA in a driver-based full screen mode.
And of course, for the DKCLB editing program and the DKCRE, there is no real minimum FPS for drawing, meaning it's hardly a problem for those programs.
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One thing I'll say though, is that these programs are NOT fit to be run on a laptop, unless it's really powerful. You're much better off running this stuff on a Desktop PC. And at least a PC with
MMX instruction set is required - if the PC doesn't have that, then chances are it's too slow to run DELTA anyway.
Also, it's probably not a good idea to try to compare DELTA with SNES emulator running DKC. DELTA is a windows program designed to emulate
and enhance upon
the game engine of Donkey Kong Country and its successors, all in 32-bit color. It takes more horsepower to run than any SNES emulator does. But it also gains some performance because it still only needs to draw 256x224 versus something like 800x600 or 1024x768.
EDIT: Great news! NitroGUI now has fullscreen capability! Also, it doesn't completely choke on 16-bit color modes like DELTA did...