Cannonball - Enhanced OutRun Engine Released

Nice awesome thx. WIll look into code soon also

 

Stretch and sound are disabled. I also locked the FPS to 30. I can't compile with O3 or Ofast (some weird locks with SDL), O2 seems to work fine. Also i got a great boost using SDL 1.2.13, i forgot that it was heavily optimized in DC, now fps are about 8-10.
Seems like some profiling needs to be done in order to know what parts of the engine are the slowest.

 

Hmm... it's a shame the compiler optimizations aren't fully working. I wonder what the problem is? Getting them working could really help if the Pandora port is anything to go by.

Unfortunately, the last time I ported anything to the Dreamcast was way back in 2001, in the very early days of DC development. There was no Dreamcast SDL in those days.

Do you know if there's a big speed difference in dropping to 16bits per pixel on DC? Could be something else to try.

If you figure out any optimizations that I can roll back into the main codebase, I'm happy to help. My code wasn't written to target a machine as low-end as the DC (with no offence to the DC), but that doesn't mean we can't try.

 

SDL for Dreamcast is not the best way to get the most of this machine, and almost any framebuffer method will be slow. At least SDL 1.2.13 uses DMA heavily to improve performance, but it doesn't compare to rendering polygons with the PVR. 16bpp may improve performance a little, but i think that it will give about 12-15 fps. Anyway, SDL rendering is not the main problem, i think (and the profiling shows some hints) that the engine itself is too heavy, i don't know why.
I know that the main goal of Cannonball is accuracy and the port was done just for fun, because almost always there's a lot of work required to get a decent speed in a DC port (specially if it uses SDL).
I'm doing some profiling to search what are parts of the engine are the most expensive, i'll show you the results later. Thanks for the interest!

 

What a great project !!!
I love it!

You really need to port it to DC, since the DC scene is still alive.
Is there a way to have a zipped tom for Mame or FBL ? It would be nice to play this version on Xbox or X360.

 

I have fixed the -Ofast compile issue (on mingw/gcc at least), so you might want to try again on Dreamcast.