Here’s a reference screenshot of a Kirby game:

Here’s that same shot running through this CRT emulator I’ve been working on:

Now I just need a game to show off this tech.

There’s a new competition running on TIGSource at the moment. The theme is “A Game By Its Cover” — contestants find an image of a box or cart for a fictional game and develop an actual game inspired by it.

I’m running with this madness (found on Famicase 2010):

I’ve been wanting to put together some tech for displaying 2D sprite graphics with Direct3D, and this should get me moving on that.

I spent a few hours tonight and got this hotness working:

Yeah, so it doesn’t look like much, but it proves the tech. I’m just drawing directly to a dynamic texture each frame. This should give me a decent compromise between the power of working directly at the pixel level (as opposed to rendering sprites as quads) and the ability to play around with post-processing effects in a shader to get some old school scan lines and whatnot. I’m a little worried about the perf costs of locking and unlocking a texture every frame, but I’ll cross that bridge once I come to it. At the moment, I think the cost of blitting pixels to the locked buffer is going to be the tighter bottleneck.

I’ll be posting tech-related progress notes here and game-related notes on the forum entry over the next few weeks. Unless I forget.