[Scummvm-devel] Introducing Myself

[Bertrand Augereau]

Hi Robin,

you just implicitly proposed to optimize the Nintendo DS CPU scaler like 
crazy! :)

You can find it in 
scummvm\trunk\backends\platform\ds\arm9\source\blitters.cpp

The function is Rescale_320xPAL8Scanline_To_256x1555Scanline (the non 
PERFECT_5_TO_4_RESCALING version, the other is just for reference)
It compresses 5 palette indices macroblocks in 4 565 resulting pixels.

I don't even know if this code is completely CPU bound or not (pixels 
are read from VRAM, and written to another place in VRAM too) and if it 
would benefit much from ASM recoding, or would be better off exploiting 
more hardwary stuff like DMA transfers, cache locking, prefetching and 
so on...

Agentq is quite busy doing the real work on the port, and I first have 
to fix some bugs around this scaler stuff for it to be completely 
usable, so you might just do this orthogonal and useful task of 
optimizing this if you like this kind of stuff!

Cheers,
Bertrand

Robin Watts wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've just been made up to developer status, and have been asked by
> Fingolfin to send a quick message here to introduce myself.
>
> I'm Robin, and I'm an alcoholic.
>
> No, wait, wrong forum...
>
> I'm Robin, and I'm a software contractor/consultant/whatever. I
> started playing with Scummvm because I was attracted to the idea of
> being able to replay Monkey Island on my smartphone when I go on
> holiday.
>
> I have a fairly broad computing background, covering audio, video,
> compression, internet etc, but I specialise mostly in ARM based
> technologies, so until now I've been tweaking bits of the code, or
> rewriting scalers/blitters/sound code and things into ARM assembler.
>
> I was originally focussing mainly on the WinCE port (as the devices I
> have are mainly WinCE based), but I'd like to help out with other
> devices too if I can.
>
> I don't have any specific areas of the code I plan to work on at the
> moment or anything, and it's in the nature of my job that my
> availability fluctuates wildly, but I hope that maybe I can be
> helpful.
>
> If you know of areas of the code that could usefully be accelerated
> on your port (in particular on ARM based devices), or even if you
> just need another pair of hands to help out with something else, then
> please let me know, and hopefully I can assist.
>
> Robin
>