Converting to PFile, Timers, Threads

["Peter Burns" <pburns@firstdata.com.au>]

CONVERTING TO PFILE

I eventually plan to support placing samples in pak files.
What do I need to do to convert convert from the standard
file functions to the ones in PFile? Is it something as easy
as replacing fread with ppfRead ?

I have been starting to using libaudiofile to load samples.
It seems to be very portable. I only had to add guards for
unistd.h and a few other minor things to get it to compile
under windows. I'd prefer to leave it to libaudiofile to
handle the samples but if it would be possible to get it
to work with pak files without modifying it.

TIMERS

Are there any utilities for setting timers in penguinplay?
I think a timer class might be very useful.
Whats the best way to implement a millisecond timeout
in unix? I've been using setitimer.  The one pitfall is
that each process has only one timer. You have to be
careful if your using threads since threads share the timer
and you need to be careful that the right thread gets the
right signal.

Windows has some nice "Multimedia timers". These
let you configure the resolution of the timer using
timeBeginPeriod and timeEndPeriod. The timeout
can be set to repeat or occur only once. The timeout
can be set to either trigger an event (which can be
waited on) or a call a callback.

THREADS

I have been using a separate thread to mix the
samples for /dev/dsp and  esound. This is done so that
it can be treated in the same manner as /dev/sequencer
and directsound.

Would it be better to instead fork a separate process for this and
communicate via a pipe or shared memory or something?

Some graphics libraries aren't thread safe.
Gtk seems to be okay with it as long
as only one thread handles the interface. Qt seems
to have problems with threads.

Peter Burns




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