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Author Topic: Spider Man [PSX] Font Issues  (Read 2 times)
Griever
Guest
« on: November 29, 2009, 03:30:02 pm »
Good day, gentlemen.
I've encounterd a problem during Spider Man debugging session: this game stores font pretty easily in 5 .fnt files, which are in solid archive. I've found them in no time, but when I dump VRAM during, let's say title screen, or cheat setup screen (where actually all font letters are displayed), I can't find any font in this dump at all!
That is pretty surprising, cause I thought, that holding actual graphics in VRAM - is the only way to display somethin on PSX...
The second step I've done is searchin each .fnt file in RAM during cheat setup screen - no bytes chunks were found in RAM dump (not surprising, cause there is no use of holding a font in RAM during screen display).
So maybe I'm missing something in PSX's hardware or mistaken somewhere? I just need to find a command, which reads from .fnt file in RAM
Gemini
Guest
« Reply #1 on: November 29, 2009, 04:19:44 pm »
I can see the font just fine with agemo's vram viewer.
Griever
Guest
« Reply #2 on: November 30, 2009, 03:42:27 pm »
But of course! That's with what I'm viewing all VRAM dumps.
Quote
I can see the font just fine
You mean that stuff:

That really look weird: it's barely 1/4th of all letters - they are all from different fonts, diffenent sizes, plus they are all scrambled around - and that's during whole alphabet display!
Gemini
Guest
« Reply #3 on: November 30, 2009, 04:28:45 pm »
Just because characters are scrambled it doesn't mean that isn't the real font sent to screen. It's just a way of optimizing space, probably caused by the fact that they had to move stuff around to allow 512x256 display for PAL builds (I guess they moved the palettes where the font was supposed to be loaded from). I did exactly the same thing with my Persona 2 translation in order to allow a full font set always in VRAM.
Griever
Guest
« Reply #4 on: November 30, 2009, 05:29:16 pm »
But that means, you need to know exact position in VRAM of each letter - that's pretty much screwed up tactics I guess - as developer you will need additional table for font org's plus you'll need to watch out for overwriting font in VRAM or update font org table every time you want to write another pattern of GFX chunks!
Gemini
Guest
« Reply #5 on: November 30, 2009, 06:38:05 pm »
Quote from: Griever on November 30, 2009, 05:29:16 pm
you'll need to watch out for overwriting font in VRAM or update font org table every time you want to write another pattern of GFX chunks!
That's why you never overwrite that area and place only static textures there. It's not really a big deal at all.
Griever
Guest
« Reply #6 on: December 01, 2009, 04:20:45 am »
Ah, now I see. So I guess, Spider Man is just that kind of gfx placement. Thanks a lot!
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