Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory (USA) freeze

[benderscruffy]

start a new game then if you choose night vision or thermal vision the emulator freezes up

[Arisotura]

the game uses the mainmem display FIFO and its associated DMA when you do so

the rendering seems to be done like this:

• the 3D scene is rendered in fakecolor, not displayed but captured to VRAM
• the thermalcam/nightcam effect is applied by software
• the screen overlay is rendered with sprites, capture is used to blend it with the processed 3D frame, which is fed via the display FIFO

not quite sure about the details, the rendering process spans multiple frames (6 in the thermalcam case) with some pipelining. DISPCNT is set to render from VRAM all the time, which explains why they have to use the display FIFO.