Hi Rich,
[mailto:fractdev-admin@mailman.xmission.com]On Behalf Of Rich
In article <000001c2e4f3$1d0fb630$017ba8c0@snoopy>, "Florian Kolbe" <flo@fkolbe.de> writes:
MAJOR TASK: would be to move the original 'fractint for DOS' code into d_fract. Anyone interested?
I'm fuzzy on d_fract.c; d_dos.c would probably be a better name for it since its a 'DOS driver', not a 'fract driver'.
I'll move it. In fact, the driver name is already 'dos' :)
The driver approach is nice - but the code still has too much control over the program flow for my taste.
Yes, the DOS code is polling-based for the I/O. All windowing systems are event driven. The way that xfractint got around this was that whenever the fractint code would poll, xfractint would poke at the message queue. Its ugly and its a hack, but it (mostly) works. I agree that its distasteful to my sensibilities, however this was "round 1 of code rehabilitation" and wasn't intended to eliminate every wart in the source base. I think its best to get the display driver stuff working again both under X11, 'disk' and under Win32 before tackling the control flow issue.
I'm working on a concept that will try to run calcfract without the 'big while loop'. One could put that in a worker thread and the GUI would still be able to react while the worker thread is calculating. One can cleanly stop the worker thread by pressing a virtual 'key'.
Always try and keep the code working with as small a change as possible.
The only major change was to remove XFRACT in favor of DOS. It's much easier to keep the DOS specific parts in #ifdef DOS-Brackets, than #ifndef XFRACT, because XFRACT does not necessarily mean all the other derivatives. I introcuded _HAVE_ALLEGRO, _HAVE_X11 and such in order optionally compile the different drivers. I now downloaded Turbo C 2.01 from http://community.borland.com/museum/, so I can try to compile the DOS part (though not yet moved to d_dos.c). Can this compiler handle it? I don't know where to get another one (though I am even willing to buy one, just someone let me know which one I should get). Florian
-- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> izfree: Open source tools for Windows Installer <http://izfree.sourceforge.net>
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