that's it then, the final piece.
You can play games, record scenes, and boot games back up with the
recorded map.
It's not perfect, _far from it_, but it works!
There is still a lot of work to do, improving heuristics and such,
but I think wideNES is at a point where it can be merged into
master and shown off a bit :)
exciting!
yeah... i'm not entirely sure of the thought process I had with my
old method... It worked, but it wasn't very clean, or intuitive.
This new method is a lot cleaner, and makes a lot more sense.
Moreover, it enables me to add the 16x16 block sampling
functionality, which is awesome, since animated blocks tend no to
get "banded" or "smeared."
I still haven't figured out the smearing issue, but I _did_ figure
out how to greatly-improve compatibility with many titles!
I added the ability to "pad" the screen, cutting-off any artifacts
at the edge. This means that with a bit of tweaking, games like
SMB3 and MC Kids work near flawlessly!
It _should_ be possible to guess "good" padding values for games by
using some heuristic that relies on current mirroring mode, scroll
direction, and if the PPUMASK is on...
I also updated the README some more, putting a "teaser" for wideNES
on the main page, but splitting off the details into it's own page.
the last tile-based approach was a very jankyboi, with oversized
tiles that were clipped using SDL, with no memory of a framebuffer.
not great, not great at all.
I revamped the system so that each tile has it's own internal
framebuffer, and updates occur by copying chunks of the main nes
framebuffer into the 4 tiles the screen currently overlaps.
this works really well, and has major upsides like
1) no more black-strips
2) possiblity to save tiles (easy access to framebuffer)
3) easier to work with
I'm still running into some issues though, the biggest of which is
that most games that scroll end up "smearing" the background...
It's hard to explain in text, but if you load up SMB2 or Metroid
for example, whenever you scroll, the stuff you leave behind has
duplicate columns, resulting in a "smearing" effect.
I'm at a bit of a loss as to what might be causing it, as the
scroll-register values being sent to the PPU by those games seem
sensible...
I'll try to fix it somehow lol.
It's kinda jank, but hey, it works?
The serious issue is that it relies on the SDL2 dylib installed
from homebrew, and if that verion ever gets bumped, RIP.
