TASEmulators / TASEmulators/BizHawk

[Enhancement] View Standard RAM as VRAM

Open
#1,768 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Ext. tool: Future tool Request: Feature/Enhancement
Dominant language
C#
Stars
2.8k
Forks
468
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Yeah, it sounds a bit silly, but hear me out on this one. So, with most 16 bit games, much of the graphics stored in the rom are compressed, so usually the game decompresses it in RAM in a predefined buffer, then the tile data gets DMA'd over to VRAM. With this feature in place, you can see the decompression in real time with RAM addresses shown on hover so you can set write breakpoints in the relevant ram locations to reverse engineer the decompression routine.

As a bonus one could include the option to change the viewer to more of a linear format so that could easily see RAM updates at a glance, perhaps using an 8-bit grayscale palette per each byte, which could help for a variety of projects.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

The issue names no files, tests, or entry points. Start by locating the existing VRAM viewer and debugging tools, then define the scope for displaying standard RAM with hoverable addresses and determine whether the optional linear grayscale view belongs in the same change.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
csharp
Domain
devtools
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.