Re: [freesci-develop] Glutton OS X sound support & wrapper for FreeSCI, was: Concerning C416: No sound on Mac OS X

[Matt]

> > Just a month or two ago I got glutton running on OS X, sans sound (if 
> > I
> > remember correctly it wasn't too difficult). Not sure how it is now.
After my mail yesterday I stayed up for some more hours and compiled 
Glutton and ran some tests. Compiled fine but starting SQ4 resulted in 
the following error:
While processing relocation block 0007:099e:
Relocation failed for index 0000
- No locals
- obj#0 at 01c6 w/ 4 vars
- obj#1 at 0218 w/ 4 vars
- obj#2 at 03de w/ 6 vars
- obj#3 at 0568 w/ 6 vars
- obj#4 at 0604 w/ 6 vars
- obj#5 at 0684 w/ 6 vars
- obj#6 at 0818 w/ 15 vars
- obj#7 at 0922 w/ 11 vars
Triggering breakpoint...
Missed breakpoint in seg_manager.c, line 747
(full startup at the end of this mail).

I have feeling this might be more game/script related than platform 
related. Trying to start SQ5 showed even more error messages (but then 
again I doubt Glutton was supposed to support that one right now).
I will try to compile and run on my linux box to see if the same error 
comes up.

>  FreeSCI's SDL graphics driver is the slowest graphics driver we
> have at the moment, and I'm not convinced that our implementation
> is to be blamed (although I'd be more than happy to see an improvement
I think there is a decent speed for the graphics (i.e. I don't think we 
were complaining about speed or so but see my message more down) and I 
am sure that the additional SDL layer does not improve the speed. I 
thought SDL was using Quartz or was this planned for a future version? 
Quartz would be the top speed for OS X, Open GL is supported but its 
not as fast if I understood everything correct. Is there any other 
multi-platform graphics engine out there that has currently OS X 
support?

>   So far, FreeSCI has managed to avoid any dependencies on non-system
> libraries at least on the UNIX side (on the non-UNIX side, our general
> infrastructure would make it possible not to depend on glue libraries
> such as libSDL-- and there has been some work on getting this to work
> for Win32, if I recall correctly-- but UNIXish systems are the only
> ones that don't need SDL at the moment). As we already have all of the
> relevant infrastructure in place, I don't see any point in dropping
> support for non-SDL libraries.
If speed would be an issue and the freesci model does not match up 
completely with SDL then we could check on implementing a specific 
Quartz support engine into freesci (that would make it probably the 
fastest script reader/emulator in the OS X world) but I am not sure if 
that would not be overkill. What other graphics engine that freesci 
supports right now works really well with it next to SDL? Maybe we just 
need to port that one.

> Glutton is nowhere as stable as the main branch, doesn't have savegames
> etc., so a public release for non-glutton would be better.
Starting on a correct wrapper would be nice though as there would be 
immediate feedback and by the time Glutton is stable the wrapper would 
also be close to a final version.
> > I personally was thinking of creating a real
> > preferences file in ~/Library/Preferences, creating a good icon,
> We already have one (a png file), but it's a little lower in resolution
> than most OS X icons are.
We should stay with the same icon preferably, would look nicer. It 
would not be too hard to take the same one and just increase the 
resolution.
> > adding
> > open dialogs, and maybe adding a preference windows. Just recently 
> > it's
> > become easy to make SDL applications even more OS X like, so there may
> > be some more possibilities.
> Note that recent work on a game selection screen indicates that we may
> actually have a built-in mechanism for setting preferences soon, 
> however:
>  a) This hasn't been implemented yet
>  b) It won't look like OS X
> Still, as there's some considerable potential overlap here, you should
> be aware of this-- it may be worth to co-ordinate efforts to build a
> common configuration infrastructure which both approaches would merely
> be frontends to.
ScummVM has this too, 'in script/emulator' preferences and game 
selection. I think this works great for most platforms and it would be 
the best to give Glutton the same feel for all platforms. Maybe we 
should just have a wizard setup for new games externally to Glutton? 
The wizard would move the game resources to a Glutton sub directory and 
ask for the initial settings. The rest of the settings or changes to 
the settings could then be run within Glutton with the general setup.

> > > Also, would the performance for the adlibemu be better with (real)
> > > sound cards instead if the basic Apple soundcards? The only card I
> What kinds of performance issues are you having? Note that there are
> two well-known problems in 0.3.x which may be related to this:
>  (a) Sound timing is generally quite a bit off-- we don't play notes
> in advance; as such, timing is off if the sound server process/thread
> is not scheduled to be run at precisely the point in time it requests
> to be run. (Yes, this is stupid, and it's why we got rid of the entire
>  sound subsystem in its current form for glutton).
>  (b) The SDL graphics driver (in its current implementation) is quite
> slow, i.e. you might be blaming the wrong subsystem here.
You know this just makes want to run FreeSCI under linux to make sure. 
It sounds (really;) like (a) and (b), the screen builds up not all too 
fast in Space Quest 3 and the sound is just 'late'. Concerning speed, I 
am running a 1 Ghz Powerbook and ~700 Mhz PowerMac, so I expected 
faster (I remember the speed for this game very well, I played it for 
hours on my XT and 286, its currently running about the 286 speed). 
What would be a easy way to see where the performance issue is located? 
You mentioned the connection to SDL, any way to enable some debug 
screen output to check the speed with and without SDL on OS X?


==Glutton error output======
Unrecognized game id: 0x07a8f43f, Loading resources...
Patching "SCRIPT.000": OK
Patching "SCRIPT.119": OK
Patching "SCRIPT.120": OK
Patching "SCRIPT.405": OK
Patching "SCRIPT.410": OK
Patching "SCRIPT.514": OK
Patching "SCRIPT.541": OK
Patching "SCRIPT.700": OK
Patching "TEXT.000": OK
Patching "TEXT.405": OK
Patching "TEXT.410": OK
Patching "TEXT.541": OK
Patching "TEXT.700": OK
Patching "VIEW.992": OK
Patching "VIEW.993": OK
Patching "VIEW.994": OK
Resmgr: Detected SCI01
FreeSCI, version 0.6.0
While processing relocation block 0007:099e:
Relocation failed for index 0000
- No locals
- obj#0 at 01c6 w/ 4 vars
- obj#1 at 0218 w/ 4 vars
- obj#2 at 03de w/ 6 vars
- obj#3 at 0568 w/ 6 vars
- obj#4 at 0604 w/ 6 vars
- obj#5 at 0684 w/ 6 vars
- obj#6 at 0818 w/ 15 vars
- obj#7 at 0922 w/ 11 vars
Triggering breakpoint...
Missed breakpoint in seg_manager.c, line 747