On Sun, Sep 05, 2004 at 10:24:19AM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
-use of tweaked vga modes in svgalib target (is/was this used by anyone?
I do! I do! Unfortunately getting svgalib 1.9's svgalib_helper kernel module to play nice with Linux kernel 2.6.x is a bitch :(
But that means that you're using an ancient version of xmame, since tweaked modes have stopped working the moment the core dropped 8 bpp support. Or are you using advance mame?
About games like bombjack, using 8 bpp modes isn't going to be such a big speedup as it used to be since we currently don't have any kind of dirty marking so we have to update the whole bitmap in the framebuffer anyway.
Unfortunately, yes. (On the other hand, you're still only blasting 1/2 or 1/4 as many octets...)
(I wish I had oodles of free time and energy; I'd fork MAME and maintain it myself, or better yet, try to work up alternate emulators that are more flexible and have less asinine licensing. Dealing with upstream arbitrariness seems to be a major source of 'discussion' in this list.)
Actually there is a project out there which tries to be mame under GPL, dunno the name but I've seen it once.
Also svgalib itself seems to be pretty much unmaintained, the latest stable release is ancient and doesn't compile on modern distro's without a pile of patches.
Quite. But at least it works... eventually. :)
And svgalib has been dropped from most current distros (debian never drops anything, except for licensing reasons)
Most current distros are targeted at people who spend their entire lives in X with KDE or Gnome. :(
Thats true, but dropping svgalib isn't bad because: -its unmaintained -its one big security hole -it only supports a small set of HW
The part about only supporting a small set of HW goes for framebuffer stuff too BTW.
As you write most current distros target people running X with KDE or GNOME, so most effort by distro's and others is going into making X run an all HW and making it run good. Why not take advantage of that by concentrating our efforts on making xmame run really really good on top of X, instead of pouring time into supporting a hack (tweaked modes) based on an unmaintained and mostly dropped library like svgalib.
I'm the person who wrote the tweaked code for svgalib in the first place and back then I loved it, part of my doesn't like to see my baby be CTRL-Y-ed away, but what needs to be done ...
Besides that in 1 few years most pc's will have lcd screens, try throwing a tweaked mode at that.
Okay SOME, maybe, but MOST? Only if we're all using iMacs and laptops, and that would suck. :)
Actually all the plain wintel desktops here at my work (a public school!) have lcd-monitors, walk into a wintel pc shop and they will be selling plenty of lcd-monitors.
-under X11 we need to share the palette with other apps
Bah. Fullscreen!
Yes going fullscreen would be an option, using Xv is a good solution for this (nice interpolated stretching done in hardware) In which case you don't need tweaked modes :)
In other words: please tell me you don't want this cruft so I can clean it out :)
In that case, I deeply apologise.
Hehe.
Still I believe that the 8 bit cruft should go, the effort to fix it and maintain it versus the gains are just to small.
As said there are 2 reasons to keep it: -running xmame on really old computers, -using tweaked modes
For both there are more then descent alternatives, which imho will beat
a kludged xmame hands down, if people have special needs they should use special tools!
Alternative for running xmame on really old computers: -we should advice the latest version with 8bpp and dirty support (back in the days when I wrote dirty support it was a big gain) The newer versions mainly add games which need a fast pc to run, so this is no gain for those people. Lawrence can you find such a version and put it up on the webpage, this would be a great service IMHO. We could even do some minimal maintainance on this version, to keep it compiling on newer OS-releases (GRRR preprocessor token pasting GRRRR)
Alternatives for tweaked modes: -Advance mame (specially designed written for this also has framebuffer support) -Add tweaked modelines to your XF86Config and use DGA2 (note this doesn't work on cards where X uses the bios to set modes)
By the way thanks for your comments, although you didn't change my mind it is good to see some discussion on this topic. So everybody, please give your 2 cents, before the remeaning (non-functional) 8bit code is removed.
Regards,
Hans
_______________________________________________ Xmame mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://toybox.twisted.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/xmame
