Nintendo Co., Ltd.

Samir Abou-Samra

Claude Comair

Robert Champagne

Sun Tjen Fam

Prasanna Ghali

Jun Pan

Xin Li

Stephen Lee

Effective color resolution of a limited-memory color-mapped display system such as a portable liquid crystal display (LCD) handheld video game system can be increased by changing the color mapping information during active display time (e.g., during the horizontal blanking interval between rasterization of successive lines on the display). A subset of the color mapping information can be rewritten during each horizontal blanking period. A full color bitmapped source image can be converted into a color-mapped image in a way that optimizes the use of such color map updates. Since photographic and photorealistic images typically don't exhibit abrupt color changes between neighboring pixels, such techniques can result in display of a color image with very high color resolution (e.g., having as many as 2048 different colors) on hardware intended to permit simultaneous display of only a much smaller number of different colors (e.g., only 56 different colors simultaneously).

Method and apparatus for displaying higher color resolution on a hand-held LCD device

A fast, texture morphing algorithm for real-time computer simulation and video games dynamically generates objects 'on the fly' by simplifying and reducing the computational load required for a texture morphing/blending process. Incremental interpolation techniques compute a morph parameter based on previous value and morph change rate. Precomputed initial and incremental morph parameter values for each texel component are applied during real-time morphing procedures using integer arithmetic. Approximation errors are reduced by incrementing/decrementing by an extra integer value when the number of morph iterations is a multiple of a frame counter. The frame counter avoids over-runs, and the morphing procedure is 'snapped' the texel value to the precise texture target value to prevent under-runs and corresponding artifacts. Interlacing (applying interpolation to a subset of the texels each frame) significantly reduces computational load without introducing significant image artifacts. The morph texture buffer data structure is initially decomposed off-line to reduce the number of real-time calculations required to manipulate texel component data.

Texture morphing process provided by the preferred embodiment of the present invention

Compressing and decompressing techniques for transformation matrices 3D computer graphics systems use to animate objects achieve high compression ratios by taking advantage of common characteristics of homogenous 3D transformation matrices. The techniques use a bitmap to encode information on locations of ones and zeros of the matrix&mdash;bypassing the penchant of compilers to represent such information as high-precision numbers. Since most video game processors and display hardware are constrained by their resolutions and since an original transformation matrix often stores data that is more accurate than necessary, the techniques convert some real numbers in the matrix (e.g., those within the range of &minus;1 and 1) into integers by scaling them by a constant. The resulting compressed matrices occupy much less storage space than their non-compressed counterparts, and can be efficiently decompressed in real time for use in interactive real time 3D animations.

3D transformation matrix compression and decompression

Loss-less data compression/decompression especially useful in a limited resource environment such as a handheld portable video game system allows graphics and/or attribute data to be efficiently and quickly decompressed on an as-needed basis in real time response to interactive user inputs. A two-level run-length-encoding is used to encode redundant patterns and redundant symbols. A common sentinel field format encodes whether data following the field is non-redundant data, a symbol run, or a pattern run. Compression ratios of 60% for representative symbol-mapped video display graphics/attribute files can be achieved.

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Vancouver, Canada

Samir Abou-Samra