[Atari800-users] Keyboard stuff (was: Re: Atari800-users Digest, Vol 127, Issue 2)

[Chris C. <chr...@gm...>]

Wow.  I had no idea my offhand mention of sluggish keyboard response in
v4.0.0 (and beyond, I suppose) had generated so much activity.  I'm not
nearly the second-by-second follower of, and near-instantaneous responder
to, email that I was in my youth, and am only just now seeing this
conversation, several days late.

On Fri, May 10, 2024 at 9:02 AM <
ata...@li...> wrote:

>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 9 May 2024 23:23:36 -0700
> From: Bill Kendrick <nb...@so...>
> To: ata...@li...
> Subject: Re: [Atari800-users] Atari800-users Digest, Vol 126, Issue 5
> Message-ID: <Zj29aISfItzXBqeE@gambit>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> On Thu, May 09, 2024 at 08:19:05AM +0200, Miro Krop??ek wrote:
> > On Thu, 9 May 2024 at 05:43, Chris Chiesa <chr...@gm...>
> wrote:
> >
> > > I still use Atari800 v2.2.1, which is ancient. I tried v4.0.0 a year or
> > > two ago and found that it was detectably sluggish in responding to the
> > > (Windows PC) keyboard, to the point of unusability.  So I will probably
> > > stay with v2.2.1 forever, until-or-unless somebody can identify, and
> back
> > > out, whatever changed in keyboard handling between then and now.
> > >
> > Did you report that bug? As this was before Github time, it's possible it
> > was forgotten even if you did.
>

I don't recall whether I reported it.  This here mailinglist is my
*only *contact
with the Atari800 development effort, so if I reported it anywhere, it was
*here*.  If this isn't the appropriate place to report it, then no, I
neverr did.

Another issue is that somewhere between five and twelve years ago I wrote a
massive, probably several hundred line, summary of a whole slew of issues I
had noticed with Atari800 v2.2.1, and either never finished-and-sent
it, or *did
*send it and got told to break it up into multiple separate messages
-- and *that
*has *definitely not *ever happened.  It's still buried in an old to-do
list and possibly somewhere in my Drafts folder here.


> > Can you precisely describe your setup (is it really visible even on
> > computers with several GHz of CPU power?), steps to reproduce/observe


Not really; I'm not at that computer right now, and if I wait until I am on
that one *and *thinking of this topic, it could be another five years
before I can get back to you.  I *was, *however, asked about its specs in
another context just a few days ago, and i remember it vaguely.  Intel I7
something something core something, and 2.90 GHz (stated twice, which I
assume means there are two or more cores).   Windows 10, but I don't
remember what edition (I prefer Professional but in retrospect was
insufficiently specific in several areas when telling my wife what kind of
"Windows 10 PC" I wanted in late 2020.

(in
> > other words, how can I notice it) ?
>

Run Atari800 v4.0.0 and type at 130 words-per-minute.  It'll miss a lot of
your keystrokes.  v2.2.1 doesn't.

If it doesn't happen in v4.0.0, it definitely will in v5.0.0.  But v5.0.0
had other annoyances so I didn't spend much time in it.

Getting a little "meta" for a second -- I see stuff suggesting people have
been having trouble with various aspects of Caps Lock behavior.  I have
been experiencing that at odd moments even in v2.2.1, for 25+ years now.
It eventually goes away (maybe even with a simple hard reset, but I don't
recall).  But you're supposed to be able to lock CAPS, and lock CTRL (so
you can type graphics characters with a single keystroke), independently
(and it doesn't seem to make any sense to ask what it would mean to lock *both
*CAPS and CTRL "at the same time").

In short, there are probably a dozen or more "little things" that aren't
quite 100% right in Atari800, but it's in my nature to simply accept things
as they are, without complaining, so I may well simply never have thought
to mention them to anybody.

I've attached my current config file (~/.atari800.cfg),
> in case any of the options I have set are useful.
>
> How can I help debug?  I haven't installed Atari800 from
> source in ages, but I'm happy to pull from the Git repo
> and build it if that could help.
>

Ah.  Right.  *THAT.*

Some longtime readers might recall seeing me ask here, sometime in 2019 or
2020, or maybe even longer ago, what it would take to build Atari800 from
scratch on Windows -- probably Windows 10 specifically, as that was the Big
New Thing at that time -- and people responding with details, and my saying
I'd be trying to get around to it when I *actually got *a Windows 10
machine.  Well, I got the Windows 10 machine in January 2021, and what with
one thing and another (if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm hugely ADHD)
I haven't gotten around to even *thinking *about *that *yet.  So, short
answer, no, I'm not currently set up to build Atari800 from source: I don't
have the tools, the libraries, the know-how, any knowledge of Github if
that's where the source code is, or any knowledge of wherever it actually
is if *not *GIthub.  To name just the factors I can think of off the top of
my head.  I seem to recall there was some sort of dififculty or other
issue, in obtaining the appropriate version, and/or form, of the SDL
library,  But maybe this current episode is the kick-in-the-pants I need to
get around to becoming able to build Atari800 from source.  Heck, that
might even allow me to find-and-fix things *myself, *as you'll note I did
back in the 90s.  I will try to find the details here in my emailbox, but
if there's a standard "how to build it" document somewhere, somebody can
certainly email me either the document itself, or a link to it, outside of
this mailinglist.

Chris