One of the examples on the GBA SDK was a function to dump a 32 kilocolour screen on a per-frame basis (it started in the VBlank and kept ahead of the scan-line to avoid glitch. I think they were considering a TV add-on, but I don't think it happened. Since Wifi can support 2Mbit/Second transfer, so using some simple compression (store chroma per pixel, colour on 4x4 pixels) would bring a frame (76K down to 24K for chroma, 4.8K for chroma. An even more extreme measure is to use 8-bit colour and split the screen up into 4 pixel tiles. Each tile has 4 states. 1-Leave tile alone 2-Reduce tile to 2 colours and print (16-bits + 2 bytes colour index) 3-Draw the sprite raw (byte per pixel so 16 bytes) 4-Copy a tile from nearby (1 bit sign, 3 bits X offset, 1 bit sign, 3 bits Y offset) so it uses 1 byte. The player can then be scaled to run at a fixed BPS rate. I would arrange the palette as 0-5 R,G,B which uses 216 colours. Maybe the values are deltas? The extra colours could be used in other ways. Since green makes up the majority of the brightness comes from the green, maybe green gets 7 bits (making 252 colours) Suggestions of what to do with the extra 4 colours are encouraged. Maybe it tells the player to take a 4x4 tile from 1 pixel from above, below, left or right. Maybe it says repeat the last color 1-3 times? Maybe it switches modes between different decode contects. I've seen this method used on the PC in the old MCGA days and it worked very well. If a frame, including audio, could get below, say, 28K per frame (or 56 for 30FPS which, after all, is enough) then the DS could broadcast FMV sequences to all the others. Maybe the Wii could have high-quality FMV which is simplified for the DS (can the GBA cable send fast enough? can the 2MBit/Second mode be used in this case?) I would most likely use CELP for audio. If it doesn't need to encode in realtime then the quality can be amazing. I just think it would be fun if you csn buy a Wii game that allows multi-player on DS & GBA and you even get the FMV off the disc. I don't know the speed of the Wii drive, but I'm sure I could write a video codec that interleaved Wii video and DS/GBA video. I would still do the DS video at 240x260 and leave a border (or maybe scale it slightly). I'm just throwing ideas out here. Input would be valued, but please be kind, I'm a total N00b. Thanks to all, Sean ;-)
