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• Dreamcast Archival

  24 mai 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Sega Dreamcast

  Console homebrew communities have always had a precarious relationship with console pirates. The same knowledge and skills useful for creating homebrew programs can usually be parlayed into ripping games and cajoling a console into honoring ripped copies. For this reason, the Dreamcast homebrew community tried hard to distance itself from pirates, rippers, and other unsavory characters.

  
  
  

  Funny how times change. While I toed the same line while I was marginally a part of the community back in the day, now I think I’m performing a service for video game archivists and historians by openly publishing the same information. I know of at least one solution already. But I think it’s possible to do much better.

  Pre-existing Art
  Famed Japanese game hacker BERO (FFmpeg contributors should recognize his name from a number of Dreamcast-related multimedia contributions including CRI ADX and SH-4 optimizations) crafted a program called dreamrip based on KOS’s precursor called libdream. This is the program I used to extract 4XM multimedia files from Alone in the Dark : The New Nightmare.

  Fun facts : The Sega Dreamcast used special optical discs called GD-ROMs. The GD stands for ‘GigaDisc’ which implied that they could hold roughly a gigabyte of data. How long do you think it takes to transfer that much data over a serial cable operating at 115,200 bits/second (on the order of 11 Kbytes/sec) ? I seem to recall entire discs requiring on the order of 27-28 hours to archive.

  If only I possessed some expertise in data compression which might expedite this process.

  KallistiOS’ Unwitting Help
  The KallistiOS (KOS) console-oriented RTOS provides all the software infrastructure necessary for archiving (that’s what we’ll call it in this post) Dreamcast games. KOS exposes the optical disc’s filesystem via the /cd mount point on the VFS. From there, KOS provides functions for communicating with a host computer via ethernet (broadband adapter) or serial line (DC coder’s cable). To this end, KOS exposes another mount point on the VFS named /pc which allows direct access to the host PC’s filesystem.

  Thus, it’s pretty straightforward to use KOS to access the files (or raw sectors) of the Dreamcast disc and then send them over the communication line to the host PC. Simple.

  Compressing Before Transfer
  Right away, I wonder about compiling 3 different compression libraries : libz, libbz2, and liblzma. The latter 2 are exceptionally CPU-intensive to compress. Then again, it doesn’t really matter how long the compressor takes to do its job as long as it can average better than 11 Kbytes/sec on a 200MHz Hitachi SH-4 CPU. KOS can be set up in a preemptive threading mode which means it should be possible to read sectors and compress them while keeping the UART operating at full tilt.

  A 4th compression algorithm should be in play here as well : FLAC. Since some of these discs contain red book CD audio tracks that need archival, lossless audio compression should be useful.

  This post serves as a rough overview for possible future experiments. Readers might have further brainstorms.

• MP4 codec support in Chromium

  18 mai 2018, par Staggan

  We have integrated Chromium Embedded Framework into our Windows game to allow us to render web pages from within our application, and everything works fine, except MP4 videos.

  I understand Chromium does not include this codec due to licensing issues, but can anyone provide details on how we can add support, even if we have to license a codec for it.

  All the information we can find seems to be old, and the functions referred to appear to be deprecated... so we are at a bit of a loss.

  All the video serving networks we have spoken to appear to serve MP4s.. so changing encoding does not seem to be an option.

  Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

  Thanks

• SNES Hardware Compression

  16 juin 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  I was browsing the source code for some Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulators recently. I learned some interesting things about compression hardware. I had previously uncovered one compression algorithm used in an SNES title but that was implemented in software.

  SNES game cartridges — being all hardware — were at liberty to expand the hardware capabilities of the base system by adding new processors. The most well-known of these processors was the Super FX which allows for basic polygon graphical rendering, powering such games as Star Fox. It was by no means the only such add-on processor, though. Here is a Wikipedia page of all the enhancement chips used in assorted SNES games. A number of them mention compression and so I delved into the emulators to find the details :

  • The Super FX is listed in Wikipedia vaguely as being able to decompress graphics. I see no reference to decompression in emulator source code.
  • DSP-3 emulation source code makes reference to LZ-type compression as well as tree/symbol decoding. I’m not sure if the latter is a component of the former. Wikipedia lists the chip as supporting "Shannon-Fano bitstream decompression."
  • Similar to Super FX, the SA-1 chip is listed in Wikipedia as having some compression capabilities. Again, either that’s not true or none of the games that use the chip (notably Super Mario RPG) make use of the feature.
  • The S-DD1 chip uses arithmetic and Golomb encoding for compressing graphics. Wikipedia refers to this as the ABS Lossless Entropy Algorithm. Googling for further details on that algorithm name yields no results, but I suspect it’s unrelated to anti-lock brakes. The algorithm is alleged to allow Star Ocean to smash 13 MB of graphics into a 4 MB cartridge ROM (largest size of an SNES cartridge).
  • The SPC7110 can decompress data using a combination of arithmetic coding and Z-curve/Morton curve reordering.

  No, I don’t plan to implement codecs for these schemes. But it’s always comforting to know that I could.

  Not directly a compression scheme, but still a curious item is the MSU1 concept put forth by the bsnes emulator. This is a hypothetical coprocessor implemented by bsnes that gives an emulated cartridge access to a 4 GB address space. What to do with all this space ? Allow for the playback of uncompressed PCM audio as well as uncompressed video at 240x144x256 colors @ 30 fps. According to the docs and the source code, the latter feature doesn’t appear to be implemented, though ; only the raw PCM playback.