Re: [AD] Allegro under Vista

["Chris Jones" <allegdev@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

Now that Vista is widespread and more people are using it, I'm starting to
get complaints from people saying that running my games in a window causes
the screen to flicker and then Aero Glass switches off. As Stephen says
below, it seems to be to do with locking the surface -- I've traced the
point at which Vista seizes up to the IDirectDrawSurface2_Lock call in
ddsurf_blit_ex in wddwin.c.

Is there any way we can refactor this code to work around Vista here?

Cheers
Chris



-----Original Message-----
From: alleg-developers-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:alleg-developers-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Stephen
Apostolopoulos
Sent: 02 June 2006 13:22
To: alleg-developers@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [AD] Allegro under Vista beta 2

Alright, I compiled allegro with mingw and tried the examples to see what  
is going on. Let's get started:

1) The window-mode directdraw driver works ok, as long as the color depth  
matches the desktop color-depth. If it does not, the screen flickers  
momentarily, and the accelerated desktop gets shut down as long as the  
allegro program runs (windows revert to a plane-looking mode, which is  
ugly and extremely annoying).

2) The directdraw overlay driver only displays a pink (I think this is  
magic pink) window and nothing else. The desktop is not affected.

3) Fullscreen 8 bit color modes can be messed up (as if there is a palette  
problem). Not all colors are affected, which is strange (images mostly  
display correctly, apart from some specific colors). The gui and the color  
map examples show this effect. Windowed modes are ok (however the  
accelerated desktop gets switched off).

4) Sound streams seem to work alright.

5) The system cursor seems ok.

6) Timing seems ok.

7) Mouse acceleration in fullscreen is strange (however, I think it always  
was).

It seems most things work ok, or better than expected (no strange crashes,  
lock-ups etc). The problem is, directdraw is relegated in vista (I don't  
have the link, but it seems that programs expecting to get exclusive  
access to the primary surface may encounter problems), and there may be a  
speed hit, at least for windowed modes (however, seeing that vista needs a  
beefy computer, this shouldn't be a problem).

Test system: Athlon XP 2500+ (1.8 GHz), ATi 9600 Pro, 1GB ram, 20 GB  
partition.

If at any point you need someone to run some tests under windows, I'll be  
here.


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