mk79 wrote:Sorry, what difficulty are you even talking about?
The difficulty of having the code modified to use more capable graphics hardware.
mk79 wrote:All this potential video hardware would do is split an already small user base even further, because most platforms would not have this hardware feature.
Then we shouldn't ever create anything new, in case we accidentally improve things for some but not others. This proposed video system would work in everything from the base QL thru the Q40/60. It wouldn't work on the Q68, but the Q68 already has very decent video. It could be added to a future Q68 if it used a slightly larger FPGA. All it needs is access to address, data, control lines, and for reads to be from shadow RAM.
mk79 wrote:On the other hand I was trying to unify the platforms through the PE, because the programmer does not have to care too much about the colour mode, the PE already does most things for you. And if the underlying platforms supports accelerated graphics like blitting then the PE supports this too, without the programmer even noticing. This is currently only true for QPC and SMSQmulator, but any potential hardware blitter could be integrated likewise, so how fucking cool is that?
That IS pretty cool
I'm trying to unify the platforms by giving the base QL Q68-like graphics capabilities. Are you saying that PE doesn't care too much about bit order for colour information, or are you saying something different? Bit order flexibility would increase the accessible capabilities of this chipset quite significantly.
mk79 wrote:Sorry, but you're setting the tone with all the "oooh, the PE is so stupid and outdated and slow and 'unconscionably difficult to work with', while at at the same time saying that you have never used it. This is not a good start, especially when somebody who wrote most of the later PE code reads your text (hint: me).
There's a bit of picking and choosing going on there. I only found out TWO DAYS AGO that the mouse buttons are reversed in PE. In 30+ hours of plugging away at it, I did not know that. I'd think that would be an important thing to mention. Maybe in the documentation. Alas, it's one of those situations where the people who wrote the documentation wrote it from a place of already knowing how to do it. It seems to be assumed that nobody might be a PE beginner and need proper introductory guides.
Which, in this day and age, someone in the know might use a screen cap routine on an emulator and simply visually introduce the concepts of the PE, one at a time. Though that seems to be a bad use of time since there will probably be only a few dozens of new users, it would certainly be welcomed by those new users. It would definitely be more intuitive to learn from that than a PDF. Especially given we're not in our teens or 20s anymore!
I also recognize the hundreds.... thousands of hours it takes to write something as complex as the PE, and maintaining it must be a bit of a rabbit hunt at times.
That said, nothing requires anyone to think positively of it. It might be a good learning experience to put a Q68 system in front of a teenager who has never seen the PE, and has a lifetime of using more standard window systems, turn it on and ask them to explore. To see what they struggle with, and what needs explaining.
It just seems weird to me that in such a small community, someone says, "well I had a really bad experience with this so I don't like it" and is roundly condemned. That not a single person, NOT ONE, asks, "so what happened? What bit did you get stuck on?" It was someone somewhere else who pointed out the mouse buttons are reversed. That one fact by itself will get me further down the road. I've set some time aside to have another go at the PE next weekend.