Setting up an OpenGL texture for emulation

In this post, I will describe how I render graphics in my emulators using OpenGL, although, the idea of drawing to textures applies to any modern graphics library.

I interface the Windows API and OpenGL to create a GUI that I can render graphics to. To render the graphics, I create a texture in the following way.

// create a texture
glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, 3, x_res, y_res, 0, GL_RGB, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, screenData);

// set up the texture
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP);   

and update the texture like this

// Update texture
glTexSubImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0 ,0, 0, NTSC_WIDTH, NTSC_HEIGHT, GL_RGB, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, screenData);

The pixel buffer i use is a 3 dimensional array, which is layed out in the following way.

u8 screenData[y][x][3];

The last 3 being the RGB value for each pixel
So, lets say I wanted to draw a blue pixel at coords(X:10, Y:15), i would do something like this.

// Draw blue pixel
screenData[15][10][0] = 0;        // R
screenData[15][10][1] = 0;        // G
screenData[15][10][2] = 255;    // B

I wont' explain too much more, instead, I'll provide the source to a small program I created to show you, which can be download from the following link. It can be compiled with Visual C++ 2010. This program creates a texture and draws some pixels to it, and also stretches the scene depending on the width and height of the window and creates a small menu, just for the sake of it.


Download here.

You will notice that in my DrawScene() function, I rotate and texture, this is because by default the bottom left is coord 0,0, when i want the top left to be 0,0.

If link goes down, make me aware please.
Peace