This is just a quick status update to celebrate the new year 2020. As teased in the Christmas update one week ago, there has been some progress on the cross-platform ports of M.A.C.E., and this update is just to give a brief glimpse of the state of Windows and Raspberry ports (with a new year celebration theme):

Platform port status: Raspberry PI

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Thanks to the hard to work and big efforts done by Pukka on the Raspberry PI port this year, we finally got it to the stage where Toni was able to integrate the platform into CMake build system, and create working builds for the test applications. Pukka found some performance issues in the SDL rendering, which motivated Toni to also get a Raspberry PI to help debug and identify the problem.

It was figured out, that the SDL2 graphics implementation we had previously used had serious issues, and was rewritten mostly to remove dependency on SDL surfaces, using instead SDL texture for the rendering. With this change, the performance on Raspberry improved to the point of matching the Mac (and Windows) platforms. Additionally, we took this opportunity to improve the fullscreen & pixel-double rendering code to the point that they are also almost ready for public testing.

However, for some reason sound does not yet work on the builds done by Toni on Raspbian 10, although they seem to work on Pukka’s Raspbian 8. This need some more investigation, alongside some other issues on the platform. The basic X11 view driver + software renderer driver combination seems to offer however a good solution for the time being.

Platform port status: Windows

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The Windows port, which we teased one week ago in the Christmas update, has advanced quickly and will soon be ready for testing. It took in total one week (the Christmas vacation) for fixing the code for MSVC compiler compatibility (a couple thousands errors), and getting the builds to run. The changes we needed to make include:

• Fixing problems with zero-size struct arrays
• Lack of typeof(x) macro leading to need to refactor all byte-swapping and RSAlloc macros (and places where they were used)
• A couple header changes (such as alloca being defined in different headers on POSIX vs. MSVC)
• Adding some Windows API code for file system iteration and manipulation alongside of POSIX/Std C code
• Fixing some bugs that were surfaced by the new port, but were affecting all platforms
• Other minor changes (clock API, refactoring unistd references, tweaking CMake configs, etc…)

The remaining tasks for first Windows test release are still integration with Windows executable resources, and storage of the NativeFS data on windows builds.

What’s next?

The year 2020 should definitely bring us to the point of releasing a more generic way to run M.A.C.E., including additional platform support, and compatibility with much more applications. At the moment the focus is – beside adding the new platform support – on getting as many of the known issues in the current test applications fixed (which you can follow in our status page). But looking forward to the stage #2 of project, we also hope to start work on Sound Manager and Color QuickDraw implementation in the second half of 2020.

Full list of changes since last post

2020-01-01 02:31:53 +0200 • Fix order of debugger setup in environment headers
2020-01-01 02:18:32 +0200 • Set MemErr to noErr if GetHandleSize succeeds     
2020-01-01 02:17:18 +0200 • Add Finnish Apple Macintosh Basics as test app    
2019-12-31 22:49:19 +0200 • Fix byteswap sign bug in CalcMask/SeedFill        
2019-12-31 04:47:15 +0200 • Only grab input in fullscreen mode                
2019-12-31 04:12:39 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of  
2019-12-31 04:12:34 +0200 • Fix GCC byteswap macros for raspberry pi          
2019-12-31 03:59:25 +0200 • Use left control as command key on windows        
2019-12-31 01:46:39 +0200 • Refactor SDLPlatform to use Textures, not Surfaces
2019-12-31 00:07:32 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of  
2019-12-31 00:07:13 +0200 • Update CMake configs and MacTCP for raspberry pi  
2019-12-30 22:25:41 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of  
2019-12-30 22:24:27 +0200 • Fix buffer overflow in StretchBits dstScanlineBuf 
2019-12-30 21:43:20 +0200 • Fix case-sensitive FS filename issue in CMake file
2019-12-30 02:07:02 +0200 • Fix+optimize pixel-double and fullscreen rendering
2019-12-29 22:41:31 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of  
2019-12-29 22:41:21 +0200 • Fix Windows build audio issue (SDL buffer format) 
2019-12-29 22:39:38 +0200 • Fix crash: Add missing Open/OpenDeny error checks 
2019-12-29 03:57:01 +0200 • Fix debug strcat in AVLTree.c for Mac version     
2019-12-29 03:33:38 +0200 • Refactor byteswapping (& clean up lot of warnings)
2019-12-29 03:25:58 +0200 • Enable console mode for now in MSVC (for debug)   
2019-12-29 03:25:18 +0200 • Fix signature of argc argument in main method     
2019-12-28 23:36:15 +0200 • Fix bug in path separator conversion in MSVC build
2019-12-28 17:32:02 +0000 • Fix some sign bugs, 1000 miles now starts on Win32
2019-12-28 17:29:58 +0000 • Use MSVC built-in byteswap macros for byteswapping
2019-12-28 17:28:21 +0000 • Fix SDL main & set executable as a Windows GUI app
2019-12-28 15:25:55 +0200 • Fix malloc.h/alloca.h header includes for MacOS   
2019-12-28 15:02:36 +0200 • Merge branch 'master' of  
2019-12-28 15:02:31 +0200 • Clean up misc debug macros etc before win32 merge 
2019-12-28 02:22:10 +0000 • A MAJOR Windows and MSVC compatibility update     
2019-12-27 21:59:06 +0000 • Fix potential timestamp conversion shift overflow 
2019-12-27 21:56:14 +0000 • Fix byteswap bug in fractional pen location init  
2019-12-27 00:39:38 +0000 • Don't try to return value from void function      
2019-12-27 00:00:32 +0000 • Fix wrong data size in low-mem Rect setter macro  
2019-12-26 23:00:41 +0000 • Merge branch 'master' of  
2019-12-26 23:00:27 +0000 • Ignore MacOS-specific files in MSVC cmake targets 
2019-12-26 22:58:38 +0000 • MSVC compatible SDL clock (and rotate macros)     
2019-12-27 00:09:04 +0200 • Init PortList and ChunkyDepth                     
2019-12-26 21:18:10 +0200 • Improve InitApplZone, add some CQD low-mem globals
2019-12-26 21:09:34 +0200 • Add proper alpha to SDL RGB output (->pixeldouble)
2019-12-26 21:08:03 +0200 • Add temporary IODone stack hack for MacTCP driver 
2019-12-26 21:04:59 +0200 • Use new enum for killCode in Sound Driver         
2019-12-26 21:04:20 +0200 • Add more logging to .IPP driver