The OutRun Rewrite Begins

I've made a start on the rewrite. Here's a quick summary of what I've been up to aside from brushing up on my C++ skills. Firstly I've installed and configured a suitable build environment, which consists of:

- Visual Studio 2010 Express C++
- DirectX SDK
- SDL (for rendering)

From there I've written code to:

- Read the tile and data roms into memory.
- Ported emulation code to emulate the text layer and convert the pixel format.
- Rewritten three 68k assembler routines decompiled from the OutRun source code.

The end result is that I can now use a fully ported C++ routine that blits text, in the form of tiles, to the screen. This routine takes the precise same input format as the original code. In the following screenshot, I've called the routine to display various text strings from the game. A simple call to blit_text(address_of_text_data) renders the text with the correct palette and screen positioning. Exactly the same as the original assembler.

The structure of the text data (which contains palette info, tile info and screen positioning) is pulled straight from ROM. Although I imagine I will eventually extract such data structures so that they are completely native.

I appreciate that drawing some text isn't particularly riveting, but the first steps in a project are always the most laborious. I'm pretty happy with the way things are going.