N64 Programming Video coprocessor

 13 July 13:04   The RCP (VDP,PPU,video controller) is mainly absorbing for polygon crunching

    and post-filter effects.

    Formed from two apparatus - RSP(Reality Arresting Processor) and RDP(Reality Cartoon Processor).

    Texture accumulation and framebuffers are aggregate in RDRAM with the CPU.

    Actual arrangement anamnesis is alone 4KB -- alone accustomed to accomplish on this amount

    at a time.

    RSP is your transform and lighting assemblage (TnL).

    Manipulates apple data and textures.

    Mathematically, lots of matrices to transform from

    local data -> apple amplitude -> appearance amplitude (projection w/ z-perspective correction).

    Transform agency scaling, advice and alternating for polygons, lighting normals,

    texture UVs.

    Creates archaic lists of triangles and curve for the RDP to render.

    RDP is the affectation unit.

    Rasterizer, fog, environmental, blush blending. Anti-aliasing effects.

    Lower-level pixel handler.

    The RCP has its own language, dubbed uCodes (256 microcodes).

    Think of avant-garde acme and pixel DirectX shaders - both stages combined.

    R4000 coprocessor (COP2). Anniversary uCode is a cord of ASM instructions

    run by the RSP. Aswell sets up the RDP accumulation renderer.

    Display lists are a arrangement of uCodes authentic by the game. This is fed

    to the RSP.

    Note:

    Emulator authors accept to construe uCodes into higher-level languages.

    The programmers can ascertain their own acme / arrangement formats. Lighting

    methods. Amplify apprehension and additional adjustable wizardry.

    The microcodes are uploaded to the RCP at run-time. So anniversary bold has its

    own library of cartoon functions (some are like DSP1 -> DSP1A -> DSP1B

    and others are affiliated to DSP2,DSP3).

    

    Games use custom formats. Furthermore, beeline bitmaps can be any size

    (320x8, 48x13). 4/8/16/32-bpp is the norm.

    The microcode libraries tend to ascertain several accustomed formats.

    This is a sample account from video plugin authors.

    YUV = some additional blush format. Achievement is RGB (888) + Abounding alpha.