Re: [AL] DOS 2K -

[Matthew S. <ma...@th...>]

Steffan sez:

> That would be great! I've got a G400 and it would be very fine to have a
> 2048x768 resolution in Allegro... :)

unfortunately going above 1792 horizontally in 32bpp will need a major
rewrite
will 16 bpp be enough?  :)

Alleister sez:

> ... whistler
> will be out in 1-2 years... thats pretty much the time you'll need to
> develop a commercial game

Manic Miner took 8 weeks , from sketchpad to cassette.  The only doc i
needed was the Speccy manual.
I should have called it `Cervinia' after the mountain resort I planned it in
:o)

> ......... you end up writing drivers for
> practically all graphic boards out there which i guess could not be
> done even with a thousend driver coders, simply because many hardware
> manufactures won't supply their hardware specs

This is a common myth.  Manufacturers are often very helpful.  They cannot
sell hardware if there is no software to run on it.
If improvements are made incrementally to the drivers for the popular cards,
then nobody has to round up 1000 coders.
I think Matrox and Voodoo drivers would keep a project alive by themselves.

> shawn's driver is kickass good, but writing a driver for 3d functions
> is even more utopic than writing hundreds of 2d drivers, since
> it takes by far more knowledge and the differences between 3d
> accelerator cards are extreme. many different chips with total
> different working concepts make it unrealistic to think this could be
> done.

3D chips tend to use exactly the same algorithm for drawing triangles that
the Allegro software rendering uses.
If this is activated, and all the memory of a card is available, then this
will make it worthwhile using the driver.

To take advantage of the Transform and Lighting functions would require a
radically new driver, with changes to the
library as well.  Feeding a list of vertices is roughly the same in concept
for all cards, though.

There seems to be no hint of z-buffering in the Library, but this is easily
remedied.

> the reason for this is that there is no DOS market anymore(apart maybee
> for virus scanners and partitioning software or bootmanagers or cipper
> written database clients<shudder>). It died
> years ago. and i have never met anybody who shed a tear for it...

You've met me . . . WAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!  ,,,,,: (

booting to DOS is so much quicker and easier to understand.


> just think of all the problems, not only graphics hardware.
> If you would write a game in dos today(which you can do even with
> hardware 3d acceleration with voodoo cards and glide) people end up
> having trouble with their soundcards and giving up A3D and extra
> features and having trouble with their network hardware and even with
> stuff like memory...

It happens the other way round too, it's nice to have the choice to use what
works best.

Harold sez:
>Is it a platform specific
>problem ( Windows specific )?  Which driver is suitable?

THE DOS ONE

Alleister sez again:
> ... have a look at old dos games. did anyone cared for
> compatibility apart from idsoftware?

and who are the World's Richest and Most Popular games designers ???? (don't
say M$)

> . . .it's wasted
> money to develop good VESA drivers from the view of a hardware vendor,
> especially since the product cycles exploded...

It's not cost them anything so far :)  hopefully they appreciate what it's
worth later in customer satisfaction and rave reviews.

> . . . . . . but if you want this way
> of coding you should think of coding for the last existing
> coming-in-a-box system, the Mac

There's a japanese sounding guy on allegro.cc who wants to port Allegro to
MacOS
New macs have PCI slots, and they use an unofficial driver to run Voodoos

yehaah we have FTP
I started this SWF sketch of the library this afternoon.
http://www.the-good-stuff.freeserve.co.uk/tech/djgpp/games/allegro_sk1.swf


Ok I'll save the body of my ranting for my site now, but i'll keep posting
updates ;o)


Matt