I am very close to releasing "Flowerpot" - open source, cross-platform
graphics and TCP/IP library (or API), which will make Arachne portable
to any platform, where "Flowerpot" compiles... I have already working
Makefile which links Flowerpot as shared library on Linux, now I have to
finish merging header files.
As Borland C++ 3.1 for DOS is freely available in Borland Museum
(AFAIK), this library may be nice tool to allow creation of portable
16bit DOS/Linux graphical applications using freely available tools;
I would like to use DJGPP too, but there are still reasons for creating
plain simple 16bit applications for certain purposes....
Any ideas what Flowerpot should or shouldn't include ?
Currently it seems it will support:
- fullscreen graphics on DOS
- WATTCP compatibility on DOS
- SVGAlib and GGI graphics on Linux (possibly SDL in future)
- BSD sockets API on Linux
- mouse and keyboard event API
- multiline text file editing functions
- GIF and BMP image displaying functions
IKN format will be abandoned in favour of optimized, accelerated and
memory-cached BMP rendering. I have already converted all IKN files to
BMP format (although it will take twice as much disk space de-compressed
- unless I would implement 4bit BMPs, but 1) I am too lazy to do that
2) using byte-per-pixel BMP would improve performance in 8bit and 16bit
colour modes, compared to 4bit BMP - most IKN files are currently 4bit
BMPs, in fact. Users who need to save disk space will be able to delete
ikon directory anyway, and it will make Arachne easily themizable
, like popular themizable programs like WinAMP, xmms, Mozilla, Gtk, Qt,
Licq, etc.
I will get rid of one of the oldest parts of Arachne code, which is
almost unreadable and doesn't make much sense, and which is also quite
unstable and hard to debug. This will also save some DOS memory, make
CORE.EXE smaller, etc.
--
Michael "xChaos" Polak
+420 603 872631 / +420 2 33355668 / ICQ# 40434104
http://www.arachne.cz (Arachne Labs homepage)
http://www.mp3records.cz (100% legal and free music)
http://www.legalizace.cz (Stop drug war & release victims !)
http://www.vojna.cz (Petice za zruseni vojny i civilni sluzby)
