Quick Question about the DC Coders Cable...

[Falco Girgis]

Okay, I didn't really learn anything from it, so, I'm ok lol

If you guys don't mind me asking, which KOS examples include rendering a sprite and the like?

And I've read and heard multiple times, SDL is a memory hog on the DC. I've looked into AllegroDC, but don't really know anything about that. I want to use KOS, because I know that's a working and stable library.

Thanks for the help guys,
~EpicAsian

Trust me, Allegro isn't going to be ANY better. Probably worse, actually. (Because I know some of the SDL libs at least have a hardware accelerated back-end).

It's really imperative that you use the PVR API to do anything remotely taxing on the DC. Otherwise you aren't even using the GPU.

I don't remember which examples specifically, but you can't miss them. I believe it's the only sprite rendering example(s) that aren't in the SDL subdirectory.

[epicasian]

I don't have my DC with me at the moment, so I can't burn the *.bin's to a CD and test. I can't use Chankast to load the *.bin's, because it doesn't recognize the mounted CDI as a game disk. I saw the PVR example folder, but no images to render are included in the folder. I've looked through the Tsunami and Parallax folders and they have examples to render a menu with an image and a *.txf file (I think, from the source, is a texture font).

Thank you, Falco for your help and patience with me . I do have another question, though ,
In the example folders, there is another folder named "romdisk". What is it's purpose?

Thank you, yet again,
EpicAsian
EdiT:I got another Emulator working, so I'll be testing the examples

[Falco Girgis]

A romdisk is a very useful concept for DC development. It's basically a virtual folder that is mounted to your DC with all of your assets. This allows your assets to be compiled in with your executable (or separately then mounted and unmounted).

For example, say you have a forest level, a water level, and an ice level. Each of these levels could have their sprite sheets, enemies, music, etc within their own "romdisk" and you could mount and unmount when you want to switch levels.

To use something from a mounted romdisk, just access it as though it were in an rd folder: "/rd/something.txt" "/rd/spritesheet.png"--the KOS filesystem resolves those files to within the romdisk.

These are extremely useful for small projects (when EVERYTHING can be in a single romdisk) or projects with assets grouped together (like "levels"). We don't use them in ES, because we handle loading/unloading all of our assets manually, but they are definitely useful.