[Scummvm-devel] Moving platform specific (down)scalers into the core of ScummVM

Kostas Nakos knakos at phys.uoa.gr
Sun Aug 2 20:27:04 CEST 2009


Hello,

John Willis wrote:
> * Historically ScummVM 'scalers' actually tend to mean upscalers and some of
> our design seems to support that.
> 
> * Are downscalers actually useful? 

Well, yes and no, with a tendency to yes. It is cool to be able to play 
on a 320x240 device 640x480 games. True you lose some gfx but it's not 
all that bad. I find this capability a strong point in the ce port. One 
could of course simply deny to do the downscaling for various reasons, 
but I do think it's a pretty good feature.

Currently these are 'tacked on' by strategically (:-P) placed calls, 
when it's obvious what the game wants and the device has. This gets the 
job done but it is not that good, evidently. And there is some kind of 
automation here; the user isn't given a chance about it (not that it 
would matter perhaps).

> * If we start to add downscalers how will we deal with the minimal invasion
> of existing code?
> 
> * Do we decouple to the overlay from the downscaled game surface (as I think
> WinCE does and I do with the GP2XWiz?)
> 
<snip>
> * Can we make all the downscaler functionality definable, maybe separate
> from upscale scalers (chances are, if a platform needs a downscaler its not
> going to need an upscaler but that may not always be true, 800*600 and
> 320*2xx games on a 640*480 device in the future maybe?)
> 
> I actually think the work need not be that major (famous last words) but it
> would require involvement of a most porters (or at least a consensus) and
> some design steering from the core team. As it is well outside of my area
> it's not really my place to try and push a specific design/idea for selfish
> reasons.

Yes we need a game plan for this. The wiki page for the small devices is 
a good start, but I think it has to get more technical before 
implementation can take place.

Cheers,
Kostas




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