Posted by Tursi on March 02, 2000 at 07:02:42:
In Reply to: Re: Ami99 Updated posted by Francois Hespel on March 01, 2000 at 07:18:12:
: I can tell the same thing : the debug version starts much much faster on my machine, and I need to switch my Riva TNT board to 65536 colors, otherwise, I get a scrambled display in Ami99.
: Well, there's another strange problem though : when I quit Ami99 and launch it again, sometimes I get a black window and can't do anything but quit the program.
: Hope this helps ...
Hmm.. I'll try to work out why the debug and release builds start so differently, then... stupid compiler. :)
I'm not sure why you're having video problems... Ami99 is not tied to any specific video mode - it uses the Windows GDI to perform colorspace conversion. I've only got two test machines again, my main system on a TNT2, where it runs beautifully, even full screen, and my work system on a Matrox G200, where I have to keep the window small for speed.
Oh.. wait, I think I *do* know your video problem. To verify my theory, does it also run correctly in 256 colors?
I had a problem on my TNT2 where if I ran in 32-bit color mode, the graphics were all distorted. I meant to document it. What I *finally* found out was that, at least on the TNT2, no matter how much video RAM you have (I have 32mb), the TNT2 can't make buffers past a certain size.
Ami99 creates long, thin buffers to store characters as they are drawn.. I don't know if this happens on cards other than the TNT2.. it does *not* happen on the Matrox, with far less RAM.
But, since I have the TNT2, I had planned to rework the code to use more square buffers. Adding Text2 support, which needed twice the number of buffered characters, is what revealed the problem, and showed that making things more square does help. For the moment, only the lower color depth will help. :(
(Any other video cards have that problem?)
I'll bet the TNT has the same problem. The *annoying* bit is that the card does not return any kind of an error, so Ami99 can't tell that the buffer is broken. :/
The black window on quit and relaunch is new to me, though. However, Ami99 does sometimes 'forget' to draw the screen.. if it loses context for some reason, it may not redraw the title page. On the black screen, try pressing a key on the window and see if the cartridge list comes up, pressing ALT-= to see if it restarts, or turning on Options->Draw when Window Inactive, and let me know if it makes any difference? (Make sure you try hitting keys.. and listen, too... is it making any sounds?) Ami99 doesn't redraw the screen if nothing has changed, and sometimes it doesn't seem to get the message from Windows that it's been made active. :/
Another thing I wanted to add - the Ami99 debug displays whether or not it was able to load it's buffers into Video RAM or not... this severely impacts performance! :) If you press 'HOME', it will go into debug mode, just increase the size of the window so you can read it, and check the messages on the bottom right of the screen. 'END' takes it out of debug mode.