Would VR Support for Supermodel be possible?

[Frapskillar]

Greetings!

I always kinda asked myself, how hard would it be to include VR Support for the Emulator.
What would be the challenges and difficultites to include such support?

Oh well this is Topic started on a Saturday night, where i really got nothing to do.

Have a nice weekend!

[Bart]

It would. Although it would be quite a bit of work and you'd have limited ability to look around. Nik once wrote a debugger with a Real3D scene graph viewer that allowed a second camera to be positioned anywhere, so you could e.g. zoom out to a bird's eye view in racing games and see what was going on, but the games were unaware of this view and so you could see that only a small portion of the track beyond what was immediately visible was actually being rendered. Similarly, we could render the two stereo views needed for VR but the problem would be that as you move your head around, a lot of geometry would be missing. It might be possible, with some effort, to figure out where in CPU memory the camera transform is stored for specific games and perhaps forcibly alter that to force the games to update the view accordingly. The in-vehicle view in the racing games would probably be the most comfortable.

It would be quite a bit of work but a great project for a C++ hacker to tackle.

[Trojan X]

Funny, I was going to ask for a progress/investigation update on this by reviving last year's thread. Glad to see that all has been answered.

Bart - What are the next steps on the Supermodel 3 scene now? Is everyone still focused on perfection in networking and enhanced emulation? Any thoughts on creating a GUI that will provide an Auto-update feature much like Teknoparrot and the RPCS3 so we don't need manually update the program without running the risk of screwing something up? Or do you think you / others will expect Supermodel to really perfect both Model 1 and 2 emulations to complete the package/set?

Thanks!

[Bart]

I don't think there are ever any definite next steps. The Supermodel team keeps in touch primarily on this forum and occasionally via email every few months or so. We're all independently pretty busy. I think right now, a long-standing project has been to reimplement the JTAG emulation given Matthew's discoveries.

I would love to have an integrated native GUI in Supermodel. Maybe someday I'll find time but honestly, it's not looking like it's going to happen this year. I'm in the process of shutting down my startup REK and embarking on another year of exploration in AI. It's more stressful than it sounds given that I'm now entering year 2 of being isolated without a job trying to find some project that sticks

I'd love to see Model 1 and 2 in Supermodel someday. Model 1 would not be difficult because MAME has nearly perfect Model 1 emulation. However, improving the emulation beyond what they have would be difficult because we lack the understanding of how they reverse engineered the undocumented instruction sets of the Model 1 DSPs. Model 2 would be an incredibly challenging undertaking.

Perhaps above all, Real3D Pro-1000 image generator emulation would be a feature I would love to see. I know Ian did some work on this and I've been thinking about slowly plugging away at it myself, first by adding support for the firmware ROMs. This would work in conjunction with the original Windows NT applications, which to this day will still run on Windows. You'd bring up Supermodel in Pro-1000 mode, it would create a fake SCSI interface, and then you'd run the Windows NT software from the Pro-1000 SDK CD-ROM and see it render in Supermodel. The real Pro-1000 connected to Windows NT PCs via a SCSI cable.

[Ian]

I don't have a lot of time for supermodel currently as am pretty damn busy with work and other responsibilities. But I like to chip away at issues when I have some time. Currently looking into why star wars has a different shading model to the rest of the games.

But most of the low hanging fruit in Supermodel has been solved already.

Model 1 emulation I always thought would have been cool. But the only issue really and this probably applies to the model 2 as well is from what I understand the gpus are really just a bunch of dsps with custom code that is uploaded by the games themselves. Maybe the code varies between the games so not sure how much high level emulation makes sense here. But that said I've no idea at what level these are being emulated in mame.

I seem to remember either the model 1 or 2 had their chips decapped. That means they physically cut the top of the chips off and we're able to basically photograph under a microscope the die. From that it's possible to actually work out the chip logic at the gate level. Such a thing would no doubt be impossible with modern chips given how small the process nodes are and how many layers modern chips have. So in theory anyway emulation of these chips could have come a long way.

But I'd love to see emulation of the real3d pro 1000. I got as far as I could with the project but not quite far enough to get games running.

[Bart]

That's a good point about the DSPs. I think Model 2 has a rasterizer ASIC somewhere in its pipeline (but no depth buffer, so polygons are either sorted by the DSP or by an ASIC). ElSemi's emulator definitely used Direct3D for rendering and was able to run at higher resolutions with wide-screen mode, I think. Model 1 I'm less sure about but I *think* there is also a rasterizer in there.

[Ian]

Seems virtua fighter is still broken in mame
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/ec ... pp#L10-L13

[Chine2]

Model 1 and 2 will be great because it needs improvement and Supermodel is quite attractive for good devs.