Re: [AD] Amiga OS 4.3.10plus patch

[Colin Ward <lists@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 25/01/2009, you wrote:
> 

[Snip]

>> I have a couple of questions about the submission.  Apart from
>> packaging up the source code to post to this list, what other steps do
>>  I need to follow? Elias mentioned updating docs/src/build/psp._tx for
>> the PSP submission.  I can make a file for the Amiga OS version too
>> although I don't know if I have a local copy of the software that
>> generates docs out of it.  What software is this?  Latex or something
>> similar I assume.
>
> It's a custom program called makedoc which is built during the build.
> All you need to do is add your file to DOCBUILDFILES in makefile.all,
> then all platforms using makefile.all will convert the ._tx
> to .txt/.html/man pages/... during the build. If your native makefile
> doesn't use makefile.all I guess it's no big problem either, as
> releases contain pre-generated build docs (AFAIK) and all the docs are
> online anyway.

Ok, thanks for the info.  I've put it on my todo list.

>> Once it's in, can someone give me Subversion access so that I can
>> continue to update it?
>
> Sure. What's your SF username again?

It's colin_ward.

>> I also have a couple of local edits of the Allegro src directory - in
>> particular we have issues with signed -vs- unsigned sound samples, but
>> that's a subject for another thread.
>
>>From what I remember, Allegro samples always have to be unsigned, but
> the mixer code supports real-time conversion to signed if the sound
> driver asks for it.

Could you elaborate?  I had a look through src/sound.c and src/mixer.c but
couln't find anything like this.

This is the "big" issue that I have to sort out before I can submit the OS4
port.  Currently I have a system that got rejected when I suggeseted it
whereby I updated the routines that load audio samples from .dat files,
from .voc files and from .wav files so that they can convert the loaded
data to signed format if requested by the sound driver.  This works well
but when I suggested doing it like this on this list a while ago it got
rejected.  Are you saying that this can be done dynamically already?

Also, even if my suggestion got accepted, we have a situation where some
games are a bit "odd" in that they seem to use the "opposite" signedness of
what they should.  For example, in .dat files 8 bit samples are in unsigned
format and 16 bit samples are in signed format.  Normally the datafile
loader will leave 8 bit samples as they are and will convert 16 bit samples
to unsigned.  So I put in some code to do the opposite and leave the 16 bit
samples as they are and convert the 8 bit samples to signed.  Fine.  This
works 99% of the time.

But then I found some games where the occasional sample is *opposite* what
it should be!  So I end up feeding a sample of the wrong signedness into my
sound card and get white noise.  Yet this same game works fine on Windows
but I can't see anywhere where Allegro checks the signedness of samples
when loading them!

I hope this makes some sort of sense.  :-)

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