Re: [hatari-devel] New option --disable-video and --benchmark

[Nicolas Pomarède <npomarede@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 25/02/2017 à 21:42, Eero Tamminen a écrit :

> And for the music listening case you mentioned, user
> cannot see/use the Atari GUI to select the song(s), so
> he needs to anyway script Hatari invocation to select
> suitable song, and inject its path to emulation with
> the help of hatari-prg-args script.
>
> -> frame-skip is more convenient for this

Hi

not necessarily, some music disk will just start without any user 
interaction, so video is not needed if you know you just need to press 
up/down arrow later to change song for exemple.

> > So, dummy driver might be good if you want to run an SDL program
> > on a system without windows capabilities, but for benchmarking it
> > doesn't disable the cost of SDL calls like Copy and Render,
> > the gain is really low (5-10% or less) compared to 35-40% by
> > really disabling SDL calls.
>
> IMHO the main point of using:
>     setenv("SDL_VIDEODRIVER", "dummy", 1);
>
> Is that you do not get any GUI. :-)
>
> However, it then being impossible for the user to invoke any
> Hatari shortcuts (like quit, and debugger invocation),
> makes it less useful e.g. for headless usage.
>
> I could imagine it being used when:
> - Invoking Hatari through hconsole (or python GUI)
> - Enabling NatFeats and having the invoked Atari program
>   call the emulator Quit functionality when it ends, or
> - Using --run-vbls option
>
> Maybe that should have another option, e.g. --no-ui/--no-gui,
> which checks that either remote control socket, natfeats or
> --run-vbls is used?

I don't know, depends if there's a user need for that. Do user really 
want to run Hatari without ui ? I'm not sure, especially with the 
limitation it needs an additional layer (console, natfeats, ...) to 
handle events.

I thought about using --benchmark and --run-vbls 100000 for example, 
with SDL UI disabled ; then if you realise you want to stop the program 
early, without key events, you will have to wait 100000 vbl (or kill the 
process which is not an easy solution for every OS)

I know I have some real case for --benchmark as it is now to profile 
some changes I'm working on ; if people have a need for disabling UI, 
let's see, but this looks like a corner case to me that will not 
interest many people. At least it can be handled by setting 
SDL_VIDEODRIVER for now, not sure it requires an option on its own.

Nicolas