On Wednesday 10 April 2002 21:17, Aaron Ardiri wrote: > comments from other game developers? i have considering writing this > little "patch" that users install depending on what device they have > and we could check for it from within our programs [games].. should > i continue the development of it? [it would be a free patch]
Just to be sure I have correctly understood : this is a proposal for having a way to detect the display controller, right ? And by calling a function, we will know which kind of controller and at which memory address it is located, I'm still right ? That seems to be a good idea ! I just don't understand the meaning of the lib id ( 'gLIB' ) you are proposing, as it will make the lib/patch sound like more a game library ( appGameLibCreator ) than a display controller detection one... Anyway, it does not matter, see below. On Wednesday 10 April 2002 21:38, Hal Mueller wrote: > Why use a device-specific patch? Why not just detect the device > make/model in a function (maybe that's in one shared library)? > > You would still have to update that shared library for new devices, > but I think that asking the average user to figure out what device he > has and to install the right patch file is a support nightmare > waiting to be hatched. I agree with Hal, this should be take care of by developers who want/need those informations, and should not rely on the user to choose and install something. But I will go further : even if I agree that one shared library is better than several little "patches", I think than 0 shared library is even better : the user will don't have to find which "patch" to choose nore he will need to install a shared library ! We can just make a public code, available for every developer that need it, and then those developers will just need to include this code into their application. We, as developers should handle all the troubles and let the users just install the application they want without to worry if they have to install some library or worse, have to choose beetwen several patches and install the good one. On Wednesday 10 April 2002 22:05, Aaron Ardiri wrote: > problem is that you can NOT detect that the display controller > is so.. you can poke around at 0x1f000000 (+offset for 0x24) > when dealing with SED controllers, but, if they dont map the > display controller to this area - your foobared. > > reading memory location that doesn't exist? = FATAL EXCEPTION By detecting which kind of CPU or even better, which kind of device the program is running on, you can almost find directly which kind of display controler is present. To be sure it's the one you are thinking of, you just need to read to some registers to identify the display controler, which mean you need to know where in memory it is located. And to know where is located the display controler, there is an easy way : just look at which address is the display screen, it will give you a hint to where is the video RAM... The last problem to solve is : who will write the code, where will it be available and at which conditions ? -- Daniel Morais -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
