YakYak

The fact that BSR is microcoded is a bad thing, not a good thing. Microcoded instructions are easily outclassed by longer instruction streams that execute non-microcoded instructions.

I use the following routine to calculate the most significant bit of a word, as defined by the Nuon (Aries) MSB ...

Bomb! only duplicates the isometric view. It uses a 16-bit pixel mode with 16-bit Z-buffer and overlapping tiles to render the display. I guess it would be nice to have the birds eye view but I don't think that anyone would choose to use it over the more attractive 3D perspective.

I did forget to ...

323.4 for me

Bomb is one of the few games that will run at 60 fps in Nuance. At least its almost always near 60 fps on my Athlon XP 2800+. Thats probably the best way to play it, although there is no sound output. I also swear that one of the later levels does not properly complete after all bombs are eliminated ...

I've considered writing a Saturn emulator. I have access to the documentation and in all seriousness, it strikes me as sort of a gimped Nuon. The similarities really are quite uncanny. I don't think it would take much work to extend my exisiting Nuon emulator framework into something that could ...

From a developer's point of view I would point out that the hardware lacks an RGB framebuffer (which they had, but took out!), and only has 4K of local code memory to work with and not enough bandwidth.

You can claim that it has no graphics hardware, but it does. There are four media processors ...

Actually the number is four. It was my birthday too

The Samsung firmware upgrade is just a Nuon program with the BIOS code in the data section. Its quite obvious from the disassembly of the program that the unit uses AMD flash memory command sequences. The commands are sent via communication packets to ID $45 which is the miscellaneous I/O interface ...

To the best of my knowledge, none of the games attempt to count cycles in order to execute delays. The only processor that would want to do it is the main processor which controls the the main game executive, and thats always MPE3 which is cached. You might be able to set up a routine so that you ...

Yes, you have to translate back. The rotation matrices or rotation components of a matrix are always for rotation about the origin of the coordinate axes. To rotate an object around a point in object space, you must first translate to the origin in screen space, perform the rotation, and then ...

I have all the games, but I haven't played Freefall yet. Ballistic may never be playable either, if only for the fact that the DVD doesn't show any files on it! This may be a simple dual-directory file protection scheme which is easily circumvented. If not, it will be the only game not able to be ...

Nuance is based on NuonEm, so the compatibility is about equal. I tested all of the SDK examples in Nuance and the only ones that don't work also did not work in NuonEm. The emulator was also ported to use the Qt GUI library and also switched from BCB5 to VC7. Remarkably, many programs, especially ...

If you have a reciprocal square root function available, obtain the reciprocal square root and substitute multiplies for the divides. Multiplies are much faster that divides on x86 processors, and many systems have fast hardware multiply but no divide. The Nuon Aries processors are a good example ...

You can use any file you want so long as it is large enough. The trick simply uses a large dummy file to ensure that the nuon.cd file gets pushed away from the inner tracks. You can use any size you want, but anything over 40 megs is probably overkill. Obviously smaller files take less time to burn ...

The extra file trick seems to work better than media tricks. Media (both CD-R and CD-RW) that worked 100% in my CD-R/CD-RW failed when I used my DVD-R. Additionally, I couldnt get white Memorex 700 MB CD-Rs to work in my N501 at all, except on rare rare occasions. Even then, they only worked one ...