Viability of Porting Sonic Mania

[nando]

How would you get the individual sprite frames out of the sprite sheets without texture coordinates? They're not stored like your typical sprite sheet on the Saturn where each frame is it's own individual image concatenated together. It's one giant 512x512 image with all the frames stored in it:
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At the very minimum we'd need to rework these to be in a format that can actually work on Saturn. You could possibly do software texture coordinates on the CPU to cut each frame out and send to VRAM, but that could add a lot of unnecessary overhead on the CPU.

you pre-process it into an asset that fits into VRAM. that can all be done before on a computer instead of doing it on the Saturn (maybe the source code can help since it probably has the coordinates for the UV mapping already). each of those animation sets can be made into a tilemap that works on the Saturn. I don't think they even need to be the same size, they just need to match the Saturn's resolution constraints for VDP1.

actually, all of the coordinates for the animations are probably stored in the .bin files in the assets folder. working out how those define the animations would be the place to start (rather than trying to manually cut up the files by hand, which won't work for distributing a "patch" or having people compile their own).

 

[TrekkiesUnite118]

you pre-process it into an asset that fits into VRAM. that can all be done before on a computer instead of doing it on the Saturn (maybe the source code can help since it probably has the coordinates for the UV mapping already). each of those animation sets can be made into a tilemap that works on the Saturn. I don't think they even need to be the same size, they just need to match the Saturn's resolution constraints for VDP1.

actually, all of the coordinates for the animations are probably stored in the .bin files in the assets folder. working out how those define the animations would be the place to start (rather than trying to manually cut up the files by hand, which won't work for distributing a "patch" or having people compile their own).

Again, this is exactly what I've been saying. You'd need to modify the assets before hand to get them into a Saturn friendly format that doesn't rely on texture coordinates to work.