GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[SubDrag]

Is there any noticeable difference? Or just might avoid an out of memory crash.

[zoinkity]

Since there was a bit of a question about VI regs, here's a link to a document covering the more obscure ones. It tries, and fails, to leave out the technical end of signal generation.
https://pastebin.com/pJG5SBnW

Y & X scale are two halfwords: the upper is a subpixel offset, the lower a scale factor.
The scale factors are a 2.10 value used to convert the image you're trying to display to the actual output size (640x480 for NTSC). Note they apply to the generated field, not the original image (that gets confusing with y scale because interlacing effectively halves that).
The values are inverted to create the scale factors. 0x400, converted to 2.10 format, is 1.0. 1.2 is the common factor for lazy NTSC -> PAL output. Deflickered mode uses 0.5 (0x800) to blend two scanlines together, then uses subpixel offsets to overlay the two interlaced fields in a 1:3 ratio.

Guessing what you're calling vstart is the Vertical Video registers. Again these are two halfwords, the number of halflines to start drawing active video and the duration counting from vsync. Under normal circumstances, the difference should match the expected actual vertical resolution (474 in NTSC).
However...if you want to letterbox, your video isn't 4:3, or you want to shift video further up or down the screen for whatever reason, the start and end can be adjusted.
The example given was gameplay in Donald Duck, running (roughly) 400x300. Vertical Video was reduced to 002D 01F3, shaving 8 from the top and 12 from the bottom. What's actually displayed is 454 instead of 474. Everything else is black--whatever the console believes is the black reference IRE.

...Which kinda also makes the point that plenty of other games used weird video modes, Rare certainly didn't have a monopoly on that front.