Pocket Heaven

[Drachonus]

have you ever heard of or tried this program for the scaling issues? Alpha-Lerp I was trying to find a fan emu of the old ghosts and goblins for the GBA when this was part of the forum for that download. the readme was critiquing pocket nes' scale. I'll include the read me on here,and if you want the site I'll post it for you.

alpha-Lerp demo version 20050627

_____________________________________________________________________
Introduction

Many computer and video game systems emulated on the GBA originally
had a screen larger than the GBA's 240x160 pixel screen. Some
emulators provide an ability to move the emulated display around
inside the GBA screen, but this quickly becomes cumbersome. Other
emulators try to scale the screen down by dropping scanlines, but
this hurts readability of text. PocketNES in particular uses
"flicker scaling" that drops different scanlines each frame, using
the natural LCD blurring effect to create a small amount of fake
interpolation, where a pixel is composed of half of one scanline
and half of the other. This works, but better is possible.

Enter alpha-Lerp. This new technique uses the GBA's alpha blending
hardware to fake linear interpolation vertically, by drawing the two
states that PocketNES would normally draw in alternate frames at
the same time and blending them together. Adding flicker scaling
to this technique allows a pixel to be one-quarter from one line
and three-quarters from another line, giving even smoother results.

_____________________________________________________________________
Compiling

You'll need MinGW (http://www.mingw.org/) and Allegro 4.03 for MinGW
(http://alleg.sourceforge.net/) to compile some tools used to build
the demo. You'll need devkitARM R11 (http://www.devkit.tk/) and the
Allegro 4.03 DLL (http://www.pineight.com/pc/#allegdll) to compile
the demo itself.

Put MinGW, then devkitARM, then the rest of your PATH.
cd tools
mk
cd ..
mk

_____________________________________________________________________
Installing

The build process finally produces a .mb file. This is a GBA program
designed to be loaded into RAM. To use it with GBA Movie Player's
"FC Game" menu or with some flash card software, you may need to
rename the file so that its suffix is ".mb.gba".

_____________________________________________________________________
Demo controls

Up and Down on Control Pad: scroll screen
A button: switch between 4:3 pixel aspect ratio (like PocketNES)
and 6:5 (like NTSC NES hardware) pixel aspect ratio

_____________________________________________________________________
Copyright 2005 Damian Yerrick

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS
BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN
AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF
OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS
IN THE SOFTWARE.
_________________
never awaken a sleeping dragon unless you wish to be the bar-b-cue.

[tepples]

Original α-Lerp topic
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.

[Dwedit]

I was thinking for a while about adding Alpha-Lerp to pocketnes, but then realized that it just wouldn't work, since PocketNES is already using the GBA's alpha blend feature.
PocketNES basically abuses the GBA's alpha blend feature to get correct display when displaying a low priority sprite, background tile, and normal priority sprite in the same position. This also means that it doesn't even use the sprite priority bits in sprites, just the Alpha Blend bit.
NesDS has alpha lerp, can anyone try it out to see if Pirahna Plants in Super Mario 3 display correctly?
_________________
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They're wearing paper hats!

[dantheman]

Screenshot courtesy of no$GBA, which may not be the best representation.



Using the default scaling.

[Covarr]

Hmm, the Mario sprite in that image is not being blended, and it looks absolutely hideous.
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Final Fantasy VII (PC Version) is not dead!

[dantheman]

The head gets squished pretty badly, yes. I usually play SMB3 in unscaled mode anyway, so it doesn't really bother me.

[mog123]

only4DS?

Haven't read it all, but would it be able to scale down SNESAdvance?
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visit me sometimes.

[Bibin]

Ohoho, no. Any more resources being taken from SnesAdvance might make your head asplode from slowness. Flicker scaling is achievable though; look at Snezziboy.

ALso, for NesDS, the sprites are 1 pixel too high.

And why is this in the Other Emu's topic?