Side projects
Every time I decide I'm going to do a programming project, I start off by reinventing the wheel. I grab that 3D Math library I never got around to finishing, start hacking some basic renderer functionality, and then embark on a pointless endeavour worthy of Captain Ahab.
This time I decided to do some research before getting too far into all that.
On the PSP, it looks like the co-processor's actually quite useful. There's a VFPU unit that allows you to do vector math at a level roughly equivalent to that of a modern GPU's vertex shaders. (Shader Model 2 level, at least.) It's quite neat, really. Only catch is you have to know enough about scheduling the instructions to not cause stalls. Luckily there are some smart folks out there who've figured most of that out.
Before I get to that, though, I want to write an export script for Blender and a GL-based viewer app for Windows. Hence the lamentations concerning ye olde 3D Math library. I did some digging online, though, and apparently Sony released a Vector Math library a year ago with optimizations for SSE, SPUs and I believe PowerPC that should work quite nicely for my needs. (It's part of the Bullet Physics SDK, which also looks quite interesting.) Nice knowing that I won't ever have to reinvent that wheel again.
Unless, of course, I want to port said library over to the PSP, in which case I get to re-add in VFPU versions of all that functionality. I'm sure Sony has internal libs with this stuff, but.. hey, whatcha gonna do. ;)
This time I decided to do some research before getting too far into all that.
On the PSP, it looks like the co-processor's actually quite useful. There's a VFPU unit that allows you to do vector math at a level roughly equivalent to that of a modern GPU's vertex shaders. (Shader Model 2 level, at least.) It's quite neat, really. Only catch is you have to know enough about scheduling the instructions to not cause stalls. Luckily there are some smart folks out there who've figured most of that out.
Before I get to that, though, I want to write an export script for Blender and a GL-based viewer app for Windows. Hence the lamentations concerning ye olde 3D Math library. I did some digging online, though, and apparently Sony released a Vector Math library a year ago with optimizations for SSE, SPUs and I believe PowerPC that should work quite nicely for my needs. (It's part of the Bullet Physics SDK, which also looks quite interesting.) Nice knowing that I won't ever have to reinvent that wheel again.
Unless, of course, I want to port said library over to the PSP, in which case I get to re-add in VFPU versions of all that functionality. I'm sure Sony has internal libs with this stuff, but.. hey, whatcha gonna do. ;)