New Payback GBA status report released

Date 19-Jul-2003 20:08:15
Topic: Software News


James Daniels of Apex Designs released the 8th update to the Game Boy Advance port of Payback.

A lot of improvements have been made to the game over the last month or so - in particular, the audio mixer has been heavily optimised so that it takes just 3.4% CPU to play a 4 channel MOD at 24 KHz - a 32% improvement on the old version's 4.5% CPU usage. This is with less than 2K of IWRAM usage - it could be reduced to as little as 3.2% at the expense of 1.5K of IWRAM (a 41% improvement over the original).

They also rejigged the menu screens and added a "bloom blur" effect. This makes bright pixels appear to "dazzle" the viewer by bleeding out into surrounding pixels. This is an effect that is only starting to be seen in the latest PC software (3D Mark 2003, for example) and, to the best of my knowledge, has never been done on the GBA before.

The full report and new screenshots and the latest "pause menu" mpeg video clip can be found here on Apex Designs website.



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