[Plex86-devel] plex86 direction: plugins & structure

[Drew Northup]

On Thu, 20 Jun 2002 address@hidden wrote:

> Today's Topics:
> 
>    1. Fwd: Re: [Plex86-devel] Release Schedule (Eric Laberge)
> 
> Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 20:54:13 -0400
> 
> Damn! I did it again.
> 
> Here's my message:
> 
> 
> What I'd like are Plex86 and Bochs being different only by loading a
> different dynamic library. 
Well the original idea was to make the user interface modular so that it
could be shared.....

>We should throw the bases of this kind of
> modularity and stop having to convert back and forth modifications to either
> project. 

Well the only real conversion that has been happening lately is working
out the bugs in the bochs stuff so that it can actually function on a REAL
system at a REASONABLE rate (what I would give for a good code profiling
tool right now, that WORKS!--a function-call tree would be useful too..., 
sounds like a job for PERL....) 

>I am experimenting on extensive COM-like modules for Plex86 (and
> yes, it is a standard and non-bloated C thing, I agreed not to use C++ in
> this project), but I don't want to be alone in this, and most of all, I want
> us to agree on a generic and common plugin standard.

Last time a checked the plugings were pretty standardized.  If there is
anything that they folks over @ bochs seem to have fixed in a reasonable
and non-bloated way, it is the plugin system.  If they could clean things
up so that they are set up in a more rational fashion, then that would
help (the cut & paste code shouldn't be in the keyboard code, for
instance), and it would also help if they would profile their code before
releasing it--since here time _does_matter_ a whole hell of a lot.

Something that we did discuss a long time back (summer 2000) was the idea
of structuring the plugin system around a common backbone and making the
whole thing (CPU's, sound, VGA, e-net, serial, parallel, HDD, CD-ROM,
floppy, keyboard..., etc....) out of a system of plugins that run in
independent spaces (threads would be _really_nice_).  If this is what
you'd like to try, then I'm all for it.  We'd have to do some real legwork
to make any of the bochs folk agree to it though.

Let me, and Eric know what you think, please!!!!
 > 
> BTW, I already have a working new config file format, so don't bother with
> this one.

Ok, hope that it is worth your effort.

> 
> 

|^^^ |  | |^^| |^^^  Drew Northup, N1XIM  |^^| |    |^^^ \  / /^^\ /^^~
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