Re: [AD] What about BeAllegro?

[Jason Wilkins <fenix@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Angelo Mottola wrote:

> I was just wondering if anyone is still working on the Allegro BeOS port. It
> would be cool to have it up to date as the other ports... Things still missing
> are a MIDI driver and a windowed gfx driver (would be cool, but not really
> needed)

I never officially stopped working on it.  But I have had other priorities
unfortunately.  Lately, I have been thinking about taking about a week off
of my other projects to work on bringing BeAllegro up to date.

Graphics-wise, this meant creating an accelerated driver and properly
implementing the 'switch' modes (I think that I originally pushed for this
addition to allegro when I discovered that Be had the ability to keep
drawing to the screen even when I switched to a different desktop using
a ctl-function key combo like in Linux).

Has sound been added?  You only mention MIDI, but I know I did not get
around to writing a sound driver.  I think I remember someone adding
digital sound, but I never got to test it because I have not had a machine
compatible with BeOS for a while (are their still no GeForce drivers?)

Joystick drivers are also missing, as well as cleaning up string handling
(UTF-8, Unicode and all that)

When I get a new harddrive I can work on it, because I have a dead Box
with a TNT2 in it but a crashed HD.

> Another thing: I installed the accelerated BeOS TNT2 driver, and only Allegro
> apps now always crash at startup. What's up? With old VESA drivers all was
> going nicely...

I only ever confirmed BeAllegro to work with my TNT card in my computer so
there is no telling why it is crashing.  Does it completely lock up the
system?

> I'd like to help, but I don't know multi-threading programming, and it looks
> like BeAllegro gfx driver uses threads and semaphores a lot...

The graphics driver only has to deal with one other thread IIRC.  That is
the window thread used by the fullscreen window object.  There are some
simple semantics for dealing with this, which can be found in The BeBook.

However, most of the code should be thread free.  I think that the
initialization and shutdown code is the hairy part.

When I get the equipment and the time I'll work on it.  Should be some
time before the end of the year.




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