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

[Stuffed Crust]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 07:28:31PM +0200, Christoph Reichenbach wrote:
> 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
> here); if I recall correctly, it is mostly that our rendering model
> does not map to SDL's conception of what a rendering model should be
> like. Again, I may be wrong, I'd be happy to be told otherwise.

That is more or less correct -- SDL is an extremely low-level API -- it
fundamentally provides little more than a raw framebuffer and a
optimized blitting functions.  For example, somethingl ike a line draw 
that X accellerates at the hardware level we have to draw pixel by pixel 
then blit over.  :)

We could probably re-work the SDL driver to be more efficient, but the 
GFX driver model really doesn't map well to the "just give me a bitmap 
to display" model that SDL is based around.  

It's worth mentioning that SDL over X is responsilble for many of the 
slowdowns; SDL on a raw framebuffer console is much faster, since it has 
direct access to the graphics memory vs the overhead of going through 
XLib calls.

>   Of course, SDL is much more popular and stable these days than it
> was when we started working on FreeSCI. It still doesn't seem to have
> any support for sound other than PCM, but it is definitely the most
> worthwhile target for an initial implementation of a PCM driver.

And of course, since SDL is so portable, it makes new ports almost 
trivially easy.  It's a nice least-common-denominator.. and a 
platform-specific driver can always be written to take advantage of the 
non-portable additional functionality that the platform offers.

(hey, it was my motivation for writing all of the original SDL code)

Though since this was about OSX initially... why couldn't we use the 
Xlib driver?  recent releases of OSX include a native X server..

> I will try to see whether I can fix the Glutton PCM sound infrastructure
> during fall break so that you guys can work with that. Of course,
> Glutton is nowhere as stable as the main branch, doesn't have savegames
> etc., so a public release for non-glutton would be better.

"fix" as in architechural stuff, or as in "something's broken"?  

(I really need to sit down and look at the new stuff..)

 - Pizza
-- 
Solomon Peachy                                   address@hidden
                                                           ICQ #1318444
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur                 Melbourne, FL

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