From: Shawn H. <Sh...@ta...> - 1997-10-01 22:41:48
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George Foot <geo...@me...> writes: >Hi; just a suggestion in search of opinions... Well, you certainly seem to have got a few of those! :-) >The current setup program (which is great in its own right) handles >only sound and music setup. Does anyone think it sensible to expand >it to also set up the video card and keyboard types, and perhaps >calibrate the joystick? Myself, I think keyboard and maybe joystick would be good, but not graphics. My reasoning: A generic setup program is something that can be distributed along with many different packages, and used to set the options that they need. Sound fits very well into such a standard utility, since all the settings are to do with your hardware and will apply equally to any program. Likewise your keyboard and joystick type: there is no reason why these need to be treated differently by different progs, you just say what sort you have, and it works :-) But the graphics are very different. Programs usually only run in certain resolutions, and only some of the drivers may work with these modes, but there are so many possible permutations that it would be very tricky to make a standard program handle them all. What if it runs in 640x480 mode, but only given a linear framebuffer and enough vram for two 16 bit pages? or if it has an option to drop down to a 320x240 mode, but only if that is supplied by an SVGA driver rather than the mode-X? Those are both very possible situations, but how on earth would you tell a generic config program about them? Also, I'm not sure how important it is to have any graphics setup options, since the autodetect works very reliably here. There are no port addresses or DMA channels to be detected, just the driver type. And all the common drivers (VGA, mode-X, VESA) can be detected with 100% reliability, unlike the soundcard. If people don't have a VESA driver they might want to set the card manually, but such people should really just get a VESA driver because that will give them a big speed boost in any case :-) Re. whoever suggested using lots of conditionals or a scripting langauge to customise the thing: sure, you could do that, but it seems to me that this would just be a gratuitous overcomplication. Really, why bother? We are all programmers, which means that we write code, so it seems to me it would be easier for people who wanted special options to just change the program and insert them that way! Also, I think that 99% of the people who want to change the program will not care about altering the options, but about changing the look of the utility. Most of the work in writing a setup program goes into making it look pretty, doing a few nice effects and animations, and there is no way that you could do all that from a script language. I think if you made such a system, you would find that some people ignored it and wrote their own setup programs from scratch, while the rest ignored it because they were just using all the default behaviour... IMHO it would be useful to add keyboard and joystick options, but nothing more than that is needed... [enter spacewarp, exit in the middle of another message...] Richard.P.Gatehouse <the...@ge...> writes: >Perhaps If we had some standard format of file for set-up information >e.g. an expansion of sound.cfg for video modes joystic/mouse This is already done! See the "configuration routines" section in the docs :-) That is assuming you have a fairly recent WIP version: if not you should really get a copy, since it doesn't make much sense to discuss future developments until you have seen what things are already done... -- Shawn Hargreaves - sh...@ta... - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/ Beauty is a French phonetic corruption of a short cloth neck ornament. |