Menu titles and first windows

Menu Manager update

After some work on the virtual MBDF code resource, and related Menu Manager routines, we now have menu titles visible on the menu bar:

The menu titles are for the first time visible on the menu bar

For testing purposes, we also switched the desktop pattern by adjusting the ‘PAT ‘ 16 resource.

Window Manager

At this point, we wanted to get work done on the actual Window Manager routines, so we chose a few of the most simple applications we had for guiding our development and testing the results. One of them was the really old “3-D Maze” app by Mark Frohnmayer. Having the Pascal source code for it, it was quite easy to trace what the 68K code in it was attempting to do, so we could handle any issues we encountered. As this application is not a full game, but rather a demonstration for a Dungeon Keeper/Wizardry style engine, it consisted mostly of DrawPicture and CopyBits calls into a window.

Even the first GetNewWindow call had a lot of dependencies to other Window Manager traps (not to mention the ShowWindow and SelectWindow later!), but we got soon the first window displayed on the screen:

The first ever window, with picture drawn into it by the 68K test app

As we focused on the actual Window Manager implementation, we left the default WDEF for now as a simple one-pixel frame (and added for testing regions a small drop shadow), the windows look quite plain at the moment, but that should be enough to get applications run further.

1000 miles creates a lot of windows!

We also tested the new Window Manager routines with another app, 1000 miles, which was quite interesting because unlike most applications, which usually have one or a few windows, it had literally a window for every possible part of it’s user interface.