Re: Interview

[Philipp Gühring <p.guehring@enemy.org>]

>We used structs in both (Win32 and Linux) versions of Quadra, and both
We used Dos, and was no alignment back then. (Watcom C++ in Protected
Mode)

>platforms do word alignment. There is a compiler pragma that works on
>both Visual C++ and gcc/egcs, "#pragma pack(1)" to start packing and
>"#pragma pack()" to stop.

I tried
#pragma align 1
but that did´nt work.

>Reading member by member is the right way to do it. But we are lazy
>bums. :-)
No. If the struct changes ...

>Am I right or this hack ignores the GGI_DISPLAY environment variable if
>it has to use palemu? I hope not...

No, first we try it normal, if this doesn´t succed, we override the
GGI_DISPLAY, so if GGI_DISPLAY works, then we use GGI_DISPLAY.

>If you have zombies, I think it may be that you have to handle the
>SIGCHLD signal. See the signal section of a good book on Unix
>programming for more information.

The next good bookstore is 50 kilometers away! :(((

>One problem we had between the Win32 and Linux versions of Quadra was
>the values used for the keys read in raw mode. Between DirectInput and
>Svgalib, they were only slightly different, with no conflict found
>between keys, but X had keycodes completely different, we had to use a
>lookup table that we populated with a lot testing.

We just recoded the whole thing with the ggi library.

>Also, the input in the Win32 version was a bit schizophrenic: on one
>side, it used DirectInput to get the raw scancodes of key pressed and
>key released, and on the other side, it listened to the Win32 API
>messages that contain translated key presses (we are french canadian, so
>accented chars are important to us, and they are done with diacritic
>keys on our keyboard (if you don't know what they are, just know you
>don't want to implement that yourself)). This was no problem for X, as
>each KeyPress event contain both the keycode and the translated stuff,
>but for Svgalib, we had to add a "mode" to our input system, and make it
>switch back and forth between raw and cooked input. Aww...

Sorry for you. Würstelstand only uses very few keys. Space to pause
videos, Enter to skip videos, Esc to escape video sequences. And the
famous anykey!

>I think GII (the input counterpart to GGI) handles key presses in a way
>similar to X, so all must be fine. Good library, I agree, just not what
>I need.

When I saw the GII specifications, it enlightened me!

--
~ Philipp Gühring              p.guehring@poboxes.com
~ http://www.poboxes.com/p.guehring  ICQ UIN: 6588261
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