MTL - Rebirth of Hong Kong’s Glorious Era-Chapter 67 PPU Graphics Controller
Li Wansui was at the door of the tv-game store, his thoughts were flying, and he said after a while: "Jiahui, I want to go in and have a look, will you come with me?"
"Well, good brother." Guan Zhilin didn't care where he went with Li Wansui, as long as Li Wansui said, she never objected.
Li Wansui took Guan Zhilin's hand and walked into this shop selling video game consoles. Because it was a new store, it might have only been open for a day or two, and it wasn't very popular. The boss put three or four TV sets. There are only two children in front of a TV.
As soon as he entered the store, Li Wansui saw the game console that two children were playing.
The game console at this time completely subverted his imagination! I was shocked!
"How could it be this kind of controller?" The controller in the children's hands was not the controller with the cross-direction keys of the Little Bawang game console that Li Wansui played when he was a child. It is a boxy, pitch-black shape, about half the size of the later five-inch mobile phone screen. There is a joystick about seven or eight centimeters long on the handle, and there is a red button in the upper left corner of the handle.
The whole handle is very simple, a joystick and a button constitute the whole handle.
Li Wansui's eyes swept across the game console again, a black box about 30 centimeters in size.
Li Wansui knew that the next generation of the little bully was a copycat Nintendo red and white machine, and he guessed in his heart, is the red and white machine not out yet? Faintly excited.
The game on the TV is a game of tennis. It is completely flat. Two small dots that can vaguely see the human shape move on the TV screen. Then the net and the background are fixed, and the TV directly Shown is a panorama of a flat tennis court.
"Simple, it's so rudimentary! Why is the color of the game so monotonous, black, white, green and gray, there are only four colors, if today's TVs display TV programs, the colors of TV programs are much richer! At least dozens of colors." Li Wanzai was a programmer who had worked on games later, and when he saw the game, he was naturally trying to figure out the quality of the game, not to mention anything else, just looking at the screen, the entire TV screen only showed black and white, green and gray, four colors, and it was very distorted. When he was making games in later generations, he knew that this kind of color adjustment could be achieved with just one line of code. He really didn't believe that the programmers at this time couldn't do it.
"And the game is very rough. This game is a game of tennis, but a white dot represents tennis. Why not be more detailed, increase the storage space for two or three pictures separately, and reconstruct a tennis ball. With two or three pictures, tennis Rotating animations can be made, and it doesn’t take much memory space.” Li Wansui was a little surprised, he didn’t believe that the developers of these games would not have thought of these things, these are all very simple things and don’t require much work. .
Li Wansui thought to himself that the colors, dynamic effects, and picture quality of games like Contra, Super Mario, and the like on Little Bawang in future generations are much better than the unknown game console in front of him. However, these games were all launched on Nintendo's red and white machine, which seems to have been launched in the early 1980s and has not yet appeared.
"Could it be a hardware limitation?"
Li Wansui couldn't wait to disassemble the game console to see what kind of configuration it was inside, and what kind of hardware configuration it was, so that these programmers could make such a simple game and use the TV as the game console. Display, but the game console can't even fully utilize the color gamut of the TV. It makes no sense. A few lines of code can make the game colorful.
The owner of the game store was always beside him, and when he saw Li Wansui pulling a beautiful little beauty staring at the TV, she looked very interested. He was very good at doing business and said, "Sir, do you want to give it a try? ?"
Li Wansui woke up and said impatiently, "Trouble the boss, bring the famous game cartridges and put them in."
He wanted to see how the quality of other games was, but Li Wansui didn't have any clues, he could only understand a little bit.
The boss turned on the TV, and Li Wansui inserted the game cassette. He simply entered each game, and then controlled the game characters to move around, and found that the picture quality was similar to the previous game. He couldn't believe it, why these programmers were not good It uses all the color gamut of the TV to display only a few lonely colors. When the TV program is obviously broadcast, the colors are richer and brighter.
Li Wansui wanted to disassemble the game console more and more to see what the mystery of the hardware inside the console was.
Guan Zhilin was sitting next to Li Wansui, a little curious why he didn't play the game, but just changed the game cassettes for a while, but she saw that Li Wansui was engrossed and didn't bother him.
After Li Wansui tried a few games, he stopped testing and said directly, "Boss, what model is this game console, and how much is it?"
When the boss saw the business, he hurriedly said: "This is the most advanced game console on the market, the Yalida 2600, and the price is 1,100 Hong Kong dollars. There is also a game console produced by a small RB factory Nintendo, COLORTVGAME6, It only costs 699 Hong Kong dollars. However, this brand of game console is not technically capable. It can only play 6 kinds of games. The game console has the function of changing game cartridges, and the games are all stored in the game console.”
Nintendo, Li Wansui became interested as soon as he heard it. He really wanted to see the products of this company that dominates the game console industry in the future. He said, "Try it."
After the boss connected the TV, Li Wansui picked up a joystick controller with a similar shape to that of Yalida. He also understood that the game controller with the cross arrow keys on the red and white machines of later generations should not have been invented yet.
Nintendo's game console has only six games, and its performance is not as good as the Yalida 2600. After a few glances, Li Wansui has no interest at all. This Nintendo has heard from later generations that it was originally a poker manufacturer. It transformed into a game and made a red and white machine before starting to make a fortune. It may be just starting now, and it is technically still very backward.
Li Wansui didn't say much, and said on the spot, "Boss, I want both machines."
After talking, he took out two big golden bulls, 2,000 Hong Kong dollars, and gave them to the boss. He looked at the clock. It was already 5 o'clock.
He faintly grasped a little inspiration in his heart, and was very eager to see the structure of this game console.
The boss took the money to Li Wansui. Although he was a little surprised to hear him ask, but the customer is God, he quickly said, "If you get what you have, you will get what you want." After speaking, he took a screwdriver from the counter and took it to Li Wansui.
Li Wansui took the screwdriver and, without saying a word, disassembled the machine.
Guan Zhilin's eyes widened, and he was very curious. Before he could speak, the boss beside him asked, "Sir, what are you doing? You can't replace it if it is damaged."
For fear of meeting a customer who touches porcelain, the boss said quickly.
Li Wansui didn't look back and said, "Don't worry, I'm just happy to see Lie Xin, something is mine, and it doesn't matter to you if it breaks."
After that, continue to work hard.
After opening the game console of Yalida 2600, Li Wansui saw a circuit board inlaid with a CPU model, mos6502, which is exactly the same as the Apple 2's CPU, and 2 memory chips, one with rom written on it (only read memory) one writes ram (random memory).
Li Wansui knows the difference between rom and ram. He is a programmer, how can he not know this, ROM is the meaning of storage space in future mobile phones, for example, Apple 7 has a size of 128G, and this 128G is ROM. RAM means that the mobile phone is running memory, and it is the memory that exchanges data with the CPU. The 8G and 16G memory that Xiaomi often talks about in later generations refers to RAM.
Li Wansui asked, "Boss, how big is the ram and how big is the rom for this machine?"
The boss is obviously knowledgeable and said: "RAM2k, ROM6k."
Li Wansui had already discovered the problem. Although he had not disassembled the red and white machine before crossing, he knew the structure of the red and white machine.
When he was bored in college, he used the emulator of the home game console on the computer, and through the emulator, he played the games that he played on the little bully when he was a child on the computer through the emulator!
The emulators are all made by programmers of the later generations, allowing players to play games on home consoles on the computer.
The principle of the simulator is to use part of the computing power on the computer to virtualize a red and white machine to use the cpu.
It is to divide a part of the computing power of the cpu on the computer, virtualize a red and white machine, and then copy the red and white machine games stored in the ROM to the computer, thereby turning the computer into a red and white machine!
A CPU emulator that emulates many primitive machines; an emulator that maps the input of many arcade or game console input devices, such as buttons, joysticks, and other controls, to keyboards, joysticks, and other devices on the PC. When the emulator is running, the original game is actually running many years ago -- it's just running on the computer.
You must know that there are many models of home consoles from many manufacturers, and the games of different manufacturers can only run on the game release platform of the year. Therefore, the emulator on the computer requires you to first determine what platform the game you want to play is running on, and then select the cpu model of this platform to simulate.
When Li Wansui played Super Mario, what he needed to simulate was Nintendo's red and white machine~www.novelbuddy.com~ You need to choose the CPU model, and you need to choose two CPU models on the simulator.
The two cpu models that need to be selected for the red and white machine on the emulator are the same as the cpu model of the Yalida 2600 game console that Li Wansui disassembled, 6502 cpu!
It's just that when the red and white cpu is selected on the emulator, one of the options is '6502cpu', and the other option is '6502cpu (ppu)'.
As a person in the industry, Li Wansui didn't know what PPU was back then, so naturally he passed it on Baidu.
One of the 6502 cpus on the red and white machine is dedicated to processing game logic. The other cpu is a graphics controller that does not handle game logic and system operations and is specifically responsible for graphics display, which is also a 6502cpu. Although both are 6502cpu, there is no difference in hardware, but the instruction set in the cpu is different.
Graphics displays are Nintendo's innovative way to change the color image of games and take full advantage of the TV's color gamut.
The two cpus are both 6502, the division of labor is clear, and the efficiency is greatly improved, and this is why the red and white machine has excellent color and excellent quality.
Li Wansui has some eggs. It hurts. He is a programmer who is not very good. He does not understand the CPU instruction set. This ppu graphics controller is stranded?
He is a little unwilling, this is the guidance given to him by the advanced vision, red and white machine! These days, every middle-class family in Europe and the United States has a game console. There are hundreds of millions of game consoles in the world. How can the scale of the current computer market of millions be comparable?
He put his hands on his temples and thought hard about countermeasures. Now he wants money but no money, and he wants technology but no technology, how can he gnaw on this PPU?
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