Movies

[hcf]

I have been wondering a thing. I have seen a bunch of PCE games that have videos: Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes II... (maybe "It came from the desert" too?). I have read some documents related to PCE development, but I have not found information about this.

I have tried to make a video only with sprites. Although the result is surprisingly decent, it's clear that this is not the correct way: in order to show video with sprites, I must be reading from CD almost all the time... and this makes impossible to play an audio track at the same time. So, unless I use the ADPCM buffer, I cannot play audio at the same time (Arkhan, don't be angry: I am talking about playing voices, not about MML music which of course CAN be played, hehehe).

Maybe the PCE has an special hardware to play videos? Anyone has worked with it?

If anyone wants to test my method of "making video with sprites", I will give an advice: it is important that the frames that we read from CD are the frames that we are NOT using at the moment. This is important to avoid flicker effects... 

[touko]

You cannot loading adpcm datas and reading CDA in same time ..

You must buffering datas first, and play CDA after.

[Arkhan Asylum]

videos are done with direct VRAM tile updating, I think.    You can do direct tile updates to make animated tiles, so videos are likely done in a similar manner.


If you load up a video and turn off the background layer, the movie goes away too

[OldRover]

You cannot loading adpcm datas and reading CDA in same time ..

You must buffering datas first, and play CDA after.

That's not what he said though. It is possible, however, to stream both graphic data and adpcm data from the disc "at the same time", even though it's actually streaming one chunk of graphic data and then one chunk of audio data. This is how HuVideo works.