[hatari-devel] How many colors when rendering in Hatari ?

[Nicolas Pomarède <npomarede@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello

after Hatari 1.7 is released, I'm planning to work on some rare video 
behaviour emulation in STF/STE mode.

This will require a lot of changes and will impact the video -> sdl pass 
that convert the internal ST bitplanes into an SDL surface.

Today, this conversion can convert the ST video to 8 bpp, 16 bpp or 24 
bpp in the SDL space. This means 3 code paths to maintain, with a common 
logic in each, but really different code in the end, especially when you 
consider options to double X and/or Y (see all the files in 
src/convert/, it's really hard to follow).

So, the question is : do we need to keep 8 bpp and 16 bpp mode ?

I think most computers running Hatari are capable of 24 bpp ; for those 
that can't handle it, maybe there's an option in SDL to convert an 
internal 24 bpp surface to 8 bpp or 16 bpp.

Or we could add in Hatari an optionnal pass to convert the 24 bpp 
surface to 8 or 16 bpp before. This would be a little slower (and that's 
not even sure), but it would be much easier to maintain a 24->8 or 
24->16 conversion of the whole surface instead of doing a specific 
conversion by blocks of 16 pixels as it is today.

What do you think ?

Nicolas