1998 FIFA World Cup

Hello,

As you know, right now 2018 FIFA World Cup is held in Russia. 20 years ago 1998 FIFA World Cup was hosted in France. Of course, such event was reflected in numerous video games on all actual platforms of that time, including N64.
One of such games is International Superstar Soccer 98. Unfortunately, GLideN64 had problems  with emulation of PAL version of the game. Why PAL version is important? Because PAL version has World Cup France 98 national teams squads updated and licensed, while the NTSC version only has the kits, but not the names of the players. So, if you want to refresh in mind who participated in the World Cup 20 years ago, you will definitely like to run PAL version of ISS 98. The issue with emulation of this game is already fixed, so you may run it with latest WIP build.

The problem with this game is quite interesting. It is related to Video Interface emulation.
Video Interface (VI) takes frame buffer rendered by RDP and maps it to TV screen. VI can skip some lines of the buffer from top and bottom, but in almost all cases it reads each line in the buffer from the beginning. I knew only one exception: Bottom of the 9th, baseball game. Title screen has vertical black bars from left and right on TV screen. Rendered frame buffer has only one wide vertical black bar on the right. That is image was centered on screen by VI. To do that, VI set read address that it points to the middle of the black area on the right. VI reads data from frame buffer line by line using specified buffer width. Since VI set start of the line at the middle of black area, it first reads half of black part of the line and then part of the next line until the middle of its black area, see the screen shot:

That way output will have black boarders from left and from right. OpenGL does not read data from buffer line by line. Thus, I added special code to emulate that effect:

PAL version of ISS 98 is another game, which starts to read lines from frame buffer with some offset. This time I don't understand the purpose of it. Look: VI starts to read buffer's line with some offset from the left and stops to read it before the line ended:

Thus, only part of the line appears on TV screen. I don't know, why developers made it that way. My code for Bottom of the 9th detected that VI reads frame buffer with offset and shifted image out of screen. I modified the code to take this situation into account too. Since VI reads only part of each line in the frame buffer, the resulted image on screen becomes cut from left and right: