Frode Tennebø wrote: > Actually, I was using the latest CVS version. You are > updating CVS? :)
Er, it's a bit stale at the moment! The bigger changes for the GUI have been spread over a couple of months, and affected many modules. During the same time some fixes and tweaks have been done to some of the same modules, and they've not been able to be checked in yet. Ideally I'd like to get a fresh version of the code for CVS, and merge in the smaller changes by hand, leaving only the GUI changes outstanding for a not-too-distant future check-in. CVS updating was fine while the changes were small, but got a bit out of hand. I must do better... > Oh - and I'm doing all the development on Linux. It's been a while since I've tried a Linux build... Would you be interested in officially looking after the Linux side? If you're short of time it'd just be good to have someone making sure it builds, but you're welcome to do as much as you want! To try and help speed the video up on Linux (and other non-Win32 platforms) I did a quick hack OpenGL version of the video code (still through SDL to keep it portable). It uses a tiled region of 256x256 textures (for compatability) to hold the screen, and display rendering is done to selective regions of the textures, before the scene is drawn. Of course the scene drawing is instant on any video card with hardware support, but the texture upload is still a bottleneck. I got as far as experimenting with packed pixel formats to reduce the overhead, but that's only supported on some cards, etc. More work needed on that too... > I'll mail you the binary this evening when I get home. Great - I'll have a look at it over the weekend. > I'm running unsynced but only gets app 3x. (333MHz) I suppose mine was on the 1.2GHz Athlon at home! Can't remember whether frameskip was 'auto' or 'show all', which would affect it too. Try holding down '+' on the numeric keypad for the Turbo feature. That limits the framerate to 5fps and runs unsynced without sound for as long as it's held - handy for long slow patches like Lyra 3 loading from disk and SAM Juggler. You can reassign it to one of the function keys or assign the toggle version of the same action if you'd prefer. > That would be great. :) What is the new UI based on? GTK? Qt? It's actually one written from scratch - fully mouse driven, but useable with just the keyboard - with a familiar set of widgets. If you have visions of the old SimCoupé interface, then I assure you that it's a long way from being like that! It's drawn on the same SAM back-buffer as the normal SAM display, so the normal video code worries about the conversion to the appropriate format for display. It started with the same resolution as a SAM mode 3 display, but with any palette colour in any position, but is in the middle of being converted to have double the vertical resolution. I have a test screenshot of the file-selector, but can't upload it to my ISP to make it available (source IP must be on their network). wxWindows was considered for a psuedo-native GUI, and might still be an option, but there's complications in integrating it with the SDL environment. A custom GUI will also work on all platforms, without relying on the GUI toolkit supporting it (I'd still like a quick-hack DOS version!). > So Simon Goodwin in LinuxFormat is THE Simon Goodwin? The very same, and he's still in touch with Andy Wright too :-) I've got a bunch of older SAM ROMs from him, which Andy has given permission to make available on NVG. The earlier ones are apparently very buggy, but it's nice to have them preserved, and to see how things have changed. I noticed the earliest ROMs don't work on final SAM hardware either, as they lack the BC delay loop at the start of the ROM code. I've done some tests with a modified Spectrum ROM, and it turned out the ASIC doesn't respond to port reads/writes in the first ~50ms (the ROM delay gives it 300ms, which is a bit too generous!). Si
