Split up data-generator into payload-generator (PTGB) and table-generator (PCCS)
The reason for this is because we don't want the dependencies to the payload stuff in PCCS.
And the tables are embedded inside libPCCS now.
Because we want to use libPCCS as a proper static lib, we now use its new Makefile to build it
before we build Poke_Transporter_GB.
This eliminates duplicate code. - Only maintain the code in one place!
To make sure the submodule is getting cloned too after cloning Poke_Transporter_GB, execute:
git submodule update --init --recursive
To update the submodule to a newer commit/different branch:
cd PCCS
git pull
git checkout <commit_or_branchname>
cd ..
git add PCCS
git commit
git push
The way it works is that a specific commit is tied to your Poke_Transporter_GB repository's PCCS folder.
- Fix make clean by adding -f flag when removing output.json
- Fix broken compress_lz10.sh script: it had a check to avoid compressing when the
input bin file hasn't changed. But the -nt operator also returns false if the output
file doesn't exist.
- Fix compilation error on conflicting u32 typedef: libtonc defines one and so does data-generator.
We shouldn't redefine it if the one from libtonc exists. The one in data-generator exists for compiling
the tool for pc.
- Fix Dockerfile. For some reason the Dockerfile was now failing because Ubuntu manages the python pip
packages. I fixed it with the --break-system-packages shortcut. It should be fine.
LZ10 decompression is builtin to the GBA's bios, so we don't need ZX0. It's also significantly faster
(618 usec instead of 2311 usec in my personal benchmark code for decompression of the same data)
And it seems like by doing so, we saved 1 KB as well!
So, seems like replacing ZX0 is the right move.
The reason I didn't initially is because I misunderstood the documentation. I assumed LZ77UnCompWram could only uncompress into EWRAM, not IWRAM.
But it turns out it can do both.
And using standardized tools is usually better than using a custom implementation.
The only downside of this right now, is that we can no longer stream text tables through a smaller buffer than the entire decompressed size.
Anyway, things seem to work fine, so bye bye ZX0. It's been fun.
This commit moves payload_builder and the z80_asm code to the data-generator subproject in order to generate the gameboy payloads
at compile time instead of at runtime.
In addition, we select a couple of base payloads (more than 1 for compressibility's sake) and generate binary patches to transform them into
other payloads. We then generate a binary file with both the base payload and binary patches and compress these files with zx0.
This reduces the rom size by about 8 KB.
To protect the world from the soft float library...
To unite all arithmetic within our binary...
To denounce the evils of floating point precision...
To save more kilobytes - that's our vision....
(god this is cringe)
All floating point math has been eliminated, and replaced with
equivalent or near-equivalent fixed-point math.
sprite_data.cpp uses Q16, and get_rand_range uses a full Q32 to
ensure that the exact same results are generated as before, at
the cost of some inline assembly to do a umull (__aeabi_lmul is a
little excessive when the lower 32 bits are discarded)
This eliminates all of the expensive double precision float library,
saving a few kilobytes.
Additionally, the unneccessary parts of nanoprintf have been
disabled. There is no need for precision specifiers, long longs, or
floats.
I eliminated these fonts by redefining code from tte_init_chr4c.c and tte_main.c files in libtonc.
Both the original tte_init_chr4c and tte_init_base functions had some code to use either verdana9 or sys8Font as default if the user
did not specify a font instance.
But we don't need it.
To eliminate this code, we not only had to define a custom version that omits this code, but also had to redefine other functions from those .c files
in order to make the linker not try to pull in those .o files from libtonc and use our versions instead.
I found another way to optimize the rom space by implementing a custom malloc, free, realloc and calloc
function.
This reduces rom size by 3 KB and IWRAM usage by 1 KB. (elimination of __malloc_av). The original
implementation is much more complex and larger than it needs to be.
The custom malloc is implemented as a bitmap allocator. It keeps a bitmap to track which pages of the
heap are allocated. Like the original allocator, it uses the free space in EWRAM after the multiboot gba
rom. But unlike the original allocator, we control the size with CUSTOM_MALLOC_POOL_SIZE.
The custom malloc can be disabled with USE_CUSTOM_MALLOC.
