Microlight3D

Microlight-3D is a 3D rendering engine for low resource devices such as mobile phones and low-cost consumer electronics. It requires only a 32bit CPU and a true-colour frame buffer. No FPU or graphics accelerator is necessary.

Features

The engine may be modified to best suit a particular application, however the basic feature set includes:

• General purpose rendering - all 3 degrees of freedom for objects and for the camera.
• Perspective correct texturing.
• Cell shading.
• Lighting.
• MIP-mapping.
• Per texel transparancy and translucency (alpha channel).
• Per pixel polygon intersection.
• 2, 4, 16 and 256 colour textures.
• Texture sizes up to 128x128.
• Texture animation.
• Object collision detection.
• Per-instance object scaling and rotation.
• Background graphics.
• Foreground 2D operations including text drawing.
• Zero overdraw.
• No memory-consuming Z-buffer. Depth precision equivalent a to 32bit Z-buffer.
• Easy to use API.

Thanks to the absence of a fixed size z-buffer the renderer's memory usage can be scaled to suit the application. The renderer also becomes less dependent on memory bandwidth.

No division operations are used making it ideal for processor such as ARM which do not implement division in hardware.

SIMD techniques are used even on processors which do not have specific SIMD instructions.

MicrolightAudio

MicrolightAudio is a low-resource audio mixer for the same class of device as Microlight-3D. It allows multiple channels of sound effects and music to be mixed down to a single output stream.

Features

The mixer is configured at compile time to suit the application however a typical feature set is:

• Two channels of sound effects.
• Four channels of music.
• Autonomous music player.
• Variable mix buffer size.
• Variable output sample rate.
• Low CPU usage.
• Simple API for ease of use.