On 6 June 2012 21:04, Thomas Harte <tomh.retros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On vaguely these lines, is there any hope of an open source version?
Absolutely. One small word of warning though - it's written in Delphi
(i.e. pascal), however this shouldn't be such a big deal as the non UI
stuff is all straight-forward procedural code, so it'd just be case of
doing a global search & replace on 6 or 7 simple terms in the .pas
files to turn them into C ("procedure "="void ", "begin"="{",
"end"="}", " := " to " = " would put you somewhere very close to have
usable C source). Obviously I'd be more than happy to lend a hand with
that as necessary.
I have noticed one bug in the Z80 code produced by the current
version. There's an interrupt reentrancy issue that completely screws
up the timing if you have only a top-border image, with nothing in the
bottom border. I'd like to resolve that, and also will likely want to
further optimise the code in light of what Si has said regarding the
visible border area (I can save a bunch of cycles by not attempting to
draw during the horizontal retrace, etc, which I currently do). Would
still like to know from someone au fait with the hardware exactly how
much horizontal overscan the real hardware produces (there must be
*some* to cope with dodgily-aligned CRTs, right???)
As soon as I've kicked those little issues in the code generation into
touch, I'll put the source up somewhere public in the hope it'll be of
some use...
Cheers,
Chris.
> It'd be nice to add a native interface to it, FireMonkey having issues
> as you describe, and I'd also like to tie it in with the little tool
> I've written for compiling sprites (the shared palette being a reason
> to integrate the things). It'd be nice to be able to import PNGs too,
> which would probably be about ten lines if I can just use the built-in
> Cocoa stuff but I assume would be bucketloads of effort to do in a
> cross-platform manner, having to build and link to libpng, etc?
>
> On 6 June 2012 07:59, Simon Owen <simon.o...@simcoupe.org> wrote:
>> On 6 Jun 2012, at 14:50, Chris Cowley wrote:
>>> I did think about limiting the editable area, but then SimCoupe has that
>>> nice "View Complete Border" option and I
>>> thought if I restricted it too much, somebody would say "Well, it'd be nice
>>> if it let you draw in the overscan area" :)
>>
>> Complete border isn't an authentic feature, but it does help with aligning
>> timing-sensitive code like yours. The default view area is balanced for
>> normal use, but you lose some lines from top and bottom. "TV-visible" adds
>> those back, and is needed to see the top border scroller above Lyra 3's
>> bouncing ball. TV-visible combined with the 5:4 display ratio option give
>> something that more closely resembles real SAM TV output, though on Vista
>> and Win7 it'll look a bit blocky I finish merging in the new D3D support
