Notices by curtmack (curtmack@floss.social)

@foone @bmartin427
It's a built-in feature of the SNES. If you enable hi-res in a graphics mode that doesn't support real hi-res grahpics, then you get this "pseudo hi-res" mode, which interleaves the main and sub screens in columns rather than compositing them through the color math system.

To get the pseudotransparency effect, you enable all of the solid graphics layers in both the main and sub screens, then enable the transparent layer in only the sub screen.

@foone @bmartin427
Standard SNES transparency is just a color average between the main screen and sub screen. It takes two whole screens of input, so transparency doesn't apply. If they used that for this screen, then the entire background layer would be averaged with color 0. To only cover part of the screen (e.g. for water effects), games use windowing. 1/2

@foone @bmartin427
The SNES has two windows, each of which only has "left edge" and "right edge" registers. To get windows of arbitrary shapes, you have to set up an HDMA list to change those registers at each scanline, like an Atari 2600 game racing the beam. So if your graphics already have the transparency you want, and especially if there are more complex shapes than SNES windows can produce, doing this with the pseudo-hires setting is preferred. 2/2

@foone Huh. All this time I had assumed it was "International Standards Organization."

@mcc @foone When I worked at IBM, I briefly had a local instance of IBM WebSphere on my work laptop. At that time, the entire build system comprised hundreds of batch scripts calling each other, and documentation was non-existent. It took me two full days of fiddling to get it built, between the raw build time and having to modify the process on the fly because our environment was not exactly the same as that of the team that originally produced it.

@foone I've mentioned in the past that a keyboard with macros programmable in BASIC (via built-in character display) would be pretty great.

@mahryekuh @foone "What are you gonna do, smite me?" - quote from transfem smited

@foone Obviously this would slow down emulation, but I think it would still be bearable, if not fullspeed. MESS could send a simple command to an external process telling it what changed, and the external process could manage recording to a database.

@foone An idea I've been mulling for a while is to hack up a copy of MAME/MESS so it dumps the entire state of the system whenever something changes. The idea is that you could then build external tools to sort through this data and trace cause and effect, which could be a huge boon to reverse engineers. And of course it would be able to keep track of things like memory segments and overlays (or for game consoles, RAM and ROM banking) as the code is executing.