Vectrex emulator with GPU rendering

[Rion]

@davej

Impressive! Really brings back that vector monitor feeling.

Could this also be applied to lr-mess? @valerino 's new scriptmodules (lr-vice-xvic, gsplus, proper lr-mess integration!) also support Vectrex via custom scriptmodules and i was curious if this could be implemented here also?

[zerojay]

I'll likely have a scriptmodule for this in a short bit, just trying to finish off something else first before I move over to this.
https://github.com/zerojay/RetroPie-Extra/blob/master/scriptmodules/libretrocores/lr-vecx.sh

[davej]

@james-milroy + @Rion :
There's no particular reason the technique couldn't be used in other emulators but I'm not sure how well it will work with colour games. It relies on the framebuffer's alpha channel to limit how bright the glow gets - the more glow gets written the less effect subsequent glow has. That works fine for monochrome but I can see potential problems with having three colour channels instead of one. e.g. What if the alpha value gets used up by multiple blue lines and then a green line is drawn (given green is much more visible than blue)? Will the green glow be attenuated too much? Would the effect be visible enough to notice? What happens on real arcade machines in such circumstances?

@zerojay :
I'll be submitting request to incorporate this into the official Libretro Vectrex core in the next day or two. Don't put effort into creating a scriptmodule if it's going to be redundant soon.

[zerojay]

@davej said in Vectrex emulator with GPU rendering:

@zerojay :
I'll be submitting request to incorporate this into the official Libretro Vectrex core in the next day or two. Don't put effort into creating a scriptmodule if it's going to be redundant soon.

It was about 5 minutes of work, no biggie.

[davej]

I've made a few, mainly cosmetic, modifications and issued the pull request so it should be merged with the main project soon.

[ReadyPlayaWon]

@davej said in Vectrex emulator with GPU rendering:

There's no particular reason the technique couldn't be used in other emulators but I'm not sure how well it will work with colour games.

I think it would be perfect for Asteroids (the 1979 Arcade game) which is not colour and would be particularly awesome to see the bullets with the Glow/Bloom effect that i remember so fondly when playing in the Arcade in 1979.

The way it's emulated in Retropie with any current emulator ... the bullets are really difficult to see without the "glow" effect :(

[mitu]

@ReadyPlayaWon Which emulator does ?

[davej]

@ReadyPlayaWon said in Vectrex emulator with GPU rendering:

I think it would be perfect for Asteroids (the 1979 Arcade game) which is not colour and would be particularly awesome to see the bullets with the Glow/Bloom effect that i remember so fondly when playing in the Arcade in 1979.

The way it's emulated in Retropie with any current emulator ... the bullets are really difficult to see without the "glow" effect :(

It's really easy to scale the size of the dots/lines based on how bright they are. With the overbright values that Asteroids uses for bullets it would be possible to make them stand out by being bigger too. It does depend if the emulators support that though.

In other news, I've been investigating how it would look if applied to colour games:

My concerns about how it would work with colour are unfounded - any theoretical effects are not noticeable during games.

Don't get too exited about that image. I hacked an emulator to add a grab current screen's vectors button and display the results in a separate program. That is very different from adding GPU rendering to an existing emulator.

[zerojay]

It looks like the pull request for this was accepted 3 days ago. I'll remove my scriptmodule now.

[Folly]

@davej

Hi,

I tried your improvements. Looks really great :)
Thanks !

Will the improvements soon be added in the master branche ?

[zerojay]

@zerojay said in Vectrex emulator with GPU rendering:

It looks like the pull request for this was accepted 3 days ago.