[AD] demo of new timer API (unix only)

[Peter Wang <tjaden@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Firstly, it looks like people are happy with the evolution idea (thank 
Chris for that), with a few reservations about compatibility.  It's 
pretty exciting.  I guess we should wait until those guys in Europe come 
back from vacation before discussing how to proceed.  I'm just going to 
assume that the existing a5 code (i.e. mostly my code :-) will be the 
first to get integrated.


As I said in a previous message, I hastily stuck my a5 timer stuff 
together with Allegro and wrote a compatibility layer for the old timer 
API, which went well.  Then I hastily stuck my a5 keyboard and mouse 
stuff in (for the X port) and wrote compatibility layers for those 
parts.  The result was a total mess but I was able to compile and play 
some old games of mine.

So I'm optimistic that compatibility layers can work well (at least for 
timers & input) -- on systems with threads.  As long as you've got 
threads, you can do pretty much anything.  DOS will probably have to be 
dropped.  Even if it was technically possible (and maybe it is), it was 
probably going to happen anyway due to lack of personnel.


Anyway, I did a nice port of the new timer & event queue APIs for unix 
back to allegro-HEAD on CVS (translating the code from C++ back to C, 
*sigh*).  I will port the Windows equivalent later in the week, possibly.

Remember to patch -p0 < patch.diff and make depend:

   http://members.ozadsl.com.au/~tjaden/a5/nu/nu-timer-api-20040809.tar.gz

Peter