#10 Flickering mouse cursor & clipping (W2k)
Hello,
Observed two small (but very noticeable!) issues with
Allegro under Win2k with DX8.1 on a Matrox G450 card
(running AMD T-Bird @ 1.4GHz):
-
software mouse cursors filcker like nuts (i.e. if I
enable the shadows for my mouse cursors they flicker
no matter where on the screen they are even if Allegro
is running in a small 320x200 window). If I disable
the shadows (=> Windows uses hardware cursors) the
flickering disappears. -
weird clipping is perfomed when running Allegro in a
window! Any tool-tips (e.g hover over the Allegro
window's "Minimize"/"Maximize"/"Close" buttons) will
appear for a fraction of a second but will
disappear/be overwritten as soon as another frame is
drawn. Other windows are clipped more or less right.
Are these two mandatory side-effects of using a
hardware surface? I have a software DVD player
(PowerDVD) that uses hardware surfaces alright (YUV
Overlay) but the cursor does not flicker and tool-
tips are properly clipped. To play a DVD in a window
or full-screen it eats up ~25% CPU (including MPEG2
deconding and sound decoding), and Allegro also takes
~20% just to draw (when running in a window), so... :)
V.
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You're probably using the DirectX windowed driver in color
conversion mode, for which Allegro automatically converts
between color formats in the background.
Allegro uses as much as possible a direct updating method
in this situation, which bypasses the normal windowing
system and consequently doesn't play nice with all the GUI
niceties. I already added an option to disable this feature
for the 4.1.x series, but the performance hit is
significant (roughly 50%).