Chapter 10: SECOND TRIANGLE!!1!

Just like the first triangle, but somehow more advanced

Disclaimer: I do not work for Sony. Despite the disturbing percentage of my shirts, jackets, and bookbags that are PlayStation dev-related, I have never worked for Sony. I do, however, have many friends that work at Sony, some of which I hope will call off the corporate lawyers. JayStation is in no way associated with Sony or PlayStation, and any stupid things I say represent only my own ineptitude and silliness.

Sorry for the delay. Liz and I are nursing a baby panther back to health, so I’ve only been able to get about 5 minutes of quality JayStation work in per week.

The road to full GL pipeline support is fraught with peril. Quite a few things are involved, such as using a completely different pipeline, using VPM and VCD, and writing vert shaders that read attributes and write varyings and vertices in the right format. Luckily before jumping to full-on vert shaders, there is an intermediate step that allows us to try out some of the useful things like uniforms and varyings, all without leaving our familiar NV pipeline mode. If you haven’t read the previous post on how to initialize the GPU and set up basic binning and rendering command buffers, now is the time. You’re gonna need it.

Before getting into how to set up uniforms and varyings, we have to go over the basics of writing shaders. This will mainly cover the QPU ISA and instruction encoding, the register file, and some basic rules and limitations. There are two register files: A and B. The first 32 registers in each regfile [r0a .. r31a] and [r0b .. r31b] are the physically backed registers, and locations above that (from r32a/b to r63a/b) are for register-space IO. There are also four general purpose accumulators and two special purpose accumulators, whose magic power is that unlike the physically backed registers, their value can be used immediately after being written.

Each register file is single ported, so instructions can’t read or write two different registers in the same file. The register map looks like this: