R14 Progress

It's been a while since I talked about R14 so I wanted to post a quick update on what I've been doing.

The Media Engine work has been going well. The job manager I talked about last week is now fairly functional and handles executing the audio upsampling code in 3 different modes: synchronously, asynchronously on the main processor, and asynchronously on the ME.

It's taken me a little longer to get the audio upsampling code working smoothly on the ME. I decided to focus on this initially (rather than Azimer's Audio HLE code) as it's a lot simpler and more self contained, but getting it working on the ME without any glitches required a little bit of work. I had to rewrite the simple ring buffer I was using to be lock-free. This is straightforward when dealing with a single reader thread and a single writer thread on the same processor, but a little more care is required when the reader and writer are operating on separate cores without cache coherency. I think getting this running glitch-free has helped prepare me well for the bigger task of getting Azimer's HLE code running asynchronously on the ME. I'll be working on this next.

Besides the ME work, I've had an interesting diversion getting some new font rendering working in Daedalus. I saw on the ps2dev.org forums that BenHur had released a library for rendering text using the PSP's built in fonts. I've always been a little unhappy with Daedalus's text rendering, and thought this would be a good opportunity to improve it. Here's a screenshot of the UI using BenHur's intraFont library (click through for a better-looking unscaled version):




I think this is looking a lot better than the previous font. The drop shadows really help make the text more readable. I also support multiple fonts for the first time, so the header text actually looks like header text :)

-StrmnNrmn