On Saturday 20 April 2002 09:57 pm, PHD wrote:
OK guys. I've been thinking a lot about our discussions and I agree that you're right. I was selfish in looking at my own desired outcomes but as a member of a team we should try to keep a single base source together. I agree that we should do incremental improvements so we all stay in synch. This is what I'll do:
1. Get WINFract working on 32 bit memory model for WIN32. 2. As far as possible within the limitations of windows, get the functionality up to 20.2.4. 3. Add 16 bit colour 4. Add a couple of other ideas I've got in mind.
I will do minimal changes to the original XFRACT source and then only via #ifdef WIN32 and send the full sources to Jonathan for synchronisation after each of the previous 4 steps. Any experimental code I'll develop into ManpWIN.
I'll start from scratch so as to keep the original code as pure as I can. Give me some time.
Your enthusiasm for the task is very much appreciated since I don't have the knowledge or inclination to tackle porting to WIN32. As demonstrated by it not having been done yet. Keep in mind that we want to switch over to the float only source one of these days. This isn't very hard, but the patches don't go in cleanly, and some will have to be done by hand. It is my intention (or hope) to eventually switch over to the experimental source. This has the interface code broken out to facilitate porting to other environments. For example, all the X11 specific code is found in d_x11.c. This is another case where the patches don't go in cleanly, so keeping it current is not always on the top of my list. It may be worth a look. This approach reproduces the DOS Fractint user interface. Not very appealing to GUI fans. My current thinking is to dump the Allegro port and make the X11 and disk video versions work using the Allegro port as a road map for how to change routines. The disadvantage to this approach is finding a way to get the sound routines to work. But, one step at a time. When you get to the point of thinking about the assembly language routines, I believe that NASM has been ported over to WIN32. The assembly code has to be rewritten anyway to use the 32 bit environment. Jonathan