[AD] MacOSX port news and more

[Angelo Mottola <a.mottola@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Just commited to our repository a couple of new drivers for the MacOS X
port. These are a digital and a MIDI drivers using the CoreAudio framework,
which is native to OSX (unlike the old sound drivers which were based on
older technologies) and is high performance. CoreAudio sports a much lower
audio latency, and the MIDI driver uses its software synthesizer audio unit
which sounds *much* better than the QuickTime one.
Thanks to the fact CoreAudio is native and loaded at system startup,
programs load times have also decreased.

Only drawback is Apple modified the CoreAudio API in the OS X 10.1 -> 10.2
transition; this was done to introduce some new features.
The new Allegro drivers are written using the so called V2 Audio Units, thus
they require OS X.2 to work. The code should compile on 10.1 as well, and
the drivers should fail to detect/init if in such an environment, but this
is not yet tested; if you are using 10.1 or you know of someone using it,
please consider testing!

>> No idea, I just noticed that xkeymap somehow treats the keys >=
>> KEY_MODIFIERS differently.
> 
> Yes, and xkeymap is not alone:
> 
> [...]
>
> so it appears that I should have been more careful before accepting Angelo's
> patch.

D'oh, I'm really sorry for what happened. I should have been more careful
before submitting the patch...

> I think we need to put the new keys before KEY_MODIFIERS and shift the
> modifiers. Hopefully this will not require us to make changes incompatible
> with the current situation.

Have you already tried and tested this on your local copy?

-- 
Angelo Mottola
a.mottola@xxxxxxxxxx