The documentation is not perfect, but there is at least http://www.kilgus.net/smsqe/display.txt which describes some new things Wolfgang and I did.
I am grabbing it :-)
Okay, but OS designers will stop designing if they have the feeling their efforts are in vain.
No but they are not in vain of course... If we gave you the impression that this was true then we miscommunicated somehow :-)
Fair enough. But as an OS developer I *of course* don't like applications working around the OS ;-)
Unless they have no other avenue in front of them... and at the time we started that held true :-)
Never heard of FreeQDOS before. If this is a project to develop colour drivers for QDOS the developers might be in for a surprise: this is WORK. If I had to bet on either hell freezing over or another development of colour drivers happening, I'd certainly go with hell.
Not trying to discourage anything, I'd like to be proven wrong, but I do think I have a pretty realistic view on things.
Don't be so negative :-P (Although here in PA, Hell and its warmth sounds very nice at the moment ;-) *brrrrrr* )
No the idea of "colour drivers" does not exist in freeQDOS in the sense that it exists on SMSQ/e or QDOS... freeQDOS is only an OS; the screen driver is "pluggable" to it (so in theory it could use SMSQ/e drivers) and there's no PE (although it will be able to use the stand-alone PE). Colours, graphics etc in the current incarnation are handled much like UN*X by a graphics "server" of sorts on which you plug any GUI on top...
freeQDOS is in essence (currently that is) a Minerva core with a lot of stuff removed and even more added... currently it aims at running on Qx0 machines, the Amiga, the Atari and the SGC (and possibly on ColdFire processors... just got the PortASM/68K for free thanks to Dave that showed me a link that Nasta showed him :-) ) taking advantage of all the extra facilities on these processors with a full cli (sash currently). It currently has support for FP commands (ergo it is extremely fast on FPU systems) and uses a lot of code originally developed for QDOS Classic... and the whole package is created and maintained using entirely free software Milestone edition 0.001a has just been reached (ie it booted under the Q40) but not much else except complete conversion of the core over to gwass from Q-Mac. Due to the lack of time it has progressed slowly over the last year but work on it continues... the reason why I do not talk about it is simply because it isn't ready... and for all purposes it is now still vapourware... so consider it non-existent :-)
However, the problem with writing software which relies on the PE to convert colours is that if I am using BASIC commands to draw things on screen, such as INK, BLOCK etc, the only way I can truly rely on the PE to handle the output from these commands is to stick to the original 8 colours - it is much easier for the program to have different code within it to cope with the different colour depths available, to prevent 2 blocks of colour merging together.
There used to be some truth to that, but on SMSQ/E v3 sprites can have any size, memory permitting (another change Jerïme and I did). The only limits still in place are for mouse pointers, they are probably still 64x64 or something like that.
See that's what we thought but where's the information?
My offer still stands :-)
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