Bob Wilkinson wrote: > Thanks Edwin, but I have that version, it's the next release I'm > waiting for, but it just seems a long time coming and some news > would be welcome.
It got archived away around New Year and was completely untouched until the middle of last month. A few people were interested in it, so I apologise to them, but it sounded like it was too much of a threat to the real SAM for people to be interested in it. The responses to the Millennium Poll asking how often is was used seemed to confirm the general lack of interest, so I lost all motivation to work on it and stopped. The fuss over releasing a GPL program without the source halted any further binary releases for people to play with - it was only ever given to people on this list as a private release, and not announced on any other sites. I'm not really sure whether people are still as anti-SAM-emulation as before - anyone want to speak up on whether it should be buried for a bit longer? It was only last month that I unpacked it and started to do a bit more on it... I've moved all the Win32-specific code out of the core modules, and am keeping it clean of any conditional code to avoid the usual unreadable conditional code soup. It's probably not completely settled down as there are some things I'm still not completely happy with, but it's most of the way there. It compiles and runs on BeOS, but with dummy versions of any OS-specific code so it's not of any use yet. Hopefully it won't be too bad to port back to Linux etc. but only time will tell - I still don't regret the revamp I've done on it. I'm back to calling it SimCoupe to show that it's more general, but will still probably refer to the Win32 version as WinCoupe if it's something specific to that version. I've added in support for MIDI out (port, interrupt and flags) to drive Windows MIDI devices (mainly for sound card synth playback) - thanks to Dave Laundon and his Mtracker app for helping me with this! Saving back to the various disk images is now hooked up too, so it's probably a lot more useful to most people that previous versions. The Atom support is still broken, as it has been since BDOS added CD-ROM support - all the ATA(PI) stuff is munged together and needs separating, as well as support adding for both master and slave. It's generally more advanced than it was in terms of emulation accuracy (instruction boundary timing support, etc.), tho I've not really looked to see how much of a performance hit it's made. On the Win32 side, the generalisation move has broken things like the option saving/loading (which was a quick (G/S)etPrivateProfileString implementation), and other new core additions may mean it's not running optimally at the moment. than it was since many people last saw it, but nothing drastic has happened in the UI dept. I've rewritten the keyboard code to cope with non-QWERTY keyboards in addition to symbols in different locations. Some of the video stuff still needs to be moved about, particularly some of the dangerous primary buffer access. I can reproduce the strange slow-down with 'Hardware support' enabled with my G200 in work (it's faster with it disabled), but haven't tracked down why it's happening. Preliminary Win9x direct disk access support is in, but it's very slow and shaky (damn the Win16 mutex!). I'm almost done with the WinNT/W2K hack, er, implementation, which is much faster and smoother than the Win9x version. I'm just finishing off the driver needed for it, which will also allow other SAM apps to use it to regular format access SAM disks (Edwin's utils etc.?), tho have a few side-effects to finish off to make it seamless. If people are happy playing with unfinished, potentially buggy test versions, I don't mind making them available as new features are added. I'm up for handing out the source in its current state, on request, and would welcome feedback and enhancements to it. I've yet to add in the GPL headers on source files and remove lots of commented test sections of code, etc. It's still under active development, and I'd like to maintain control the master source for now; I'd also like to keep control of official releases of it, and would prefer if there weren't unofficial versions floating about. Any objections? That about cover what were asking? (*runs for cover*) Si btw, my personal e-mail address has changed from [EMAIL PROTECTED] to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Upgrading to a cable modem at home has also meant my Demon web page has gone, tho I have got an new site to put things on, eventually.
