New Mini vMac Snapshot: March 23

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ClockWise
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New Mini vMac Snapshot: March 23

Post by ClockWise »

There is another new development snapshot of Mini vMac now available:

http://minivmac.sourceforge.net/

"Today's Development source snapshot includes initial support for color in the X Version (for Mac II emulation), and a build system option for higher magnification factors than 2.

The X Version so far only supports 24 bit "TrueColor", and has a few other limitations on format. I doubt that anything besides TrueColor is used on modern machines, and so probably won't support the other options. Other depths such as 15, 16, and 32 bits may be used, and so probably should be supported, if I can find a way to test them.

A new build system option "-mf" allows changing magnification from the default 2. For example, "-mf 3" sets the magnification to 3. This may be useful as modern screens get higher resolutions. The option "-mf 1" disables magnification (removing the Control-M command). At least for now, the magnification factor must be an integer.

Though it wasn't previously supported by the build system, the code for the OS X version already allowed higher magnification. The Windows version also had such code, though it was slightly broken. These versions were easy, because the APIs have support for magnification. The X API doesn't seem to have such support. Mini vMac previously implemented it's own code for 2x magnification.

Today's X version implements a more general magnification algorithm that is also simpler and faster, using a table to process one byte at time. The OS X version now also uses a table to process a byte at time when the color depth is 3 or less. Even though magnification doesn't need to be handled, it is still simpler and faster than the previous methods.

The OS X and X versions now take advantage of knowing the left and right of the changed area to reduce the work when translating between the emulated screen format and the host screen format. Recent versions of Mini vMac started finding the left and right of the changed area, to allow autoslow to work better, and to reduce drawing to the real screen. But the translation step hadn't been updated.

The Mini vMac build system should now work properly in other emulators such as SheepShaver. It was anonymously reported that the build system would crash emulators. The test for whether the build system was running in Mini vMac (so that the resulting archive may be exported to the host) was not good enough.

The same report also mentioned a number of unused parameters warnings when compiling the SCC emulation, which should be fixed now."
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