The ongoing epidemic in the world these days is sadly the focus of the news and is touching in some way all of us, and we hope the people reading this will stay safe and healthy during these challenging times. Although our close ones have not (yet) been affected directly by the situation, the impact on our daily lives is already taking effect, as some of us are currently working remotely from home, borders are being closed, and toilet paper is being stockpiled.

One way for us to deal in these times when our lives are getting limited, is to focus our energy on the things we love, one of which for us is working on this project. And hopefully our ongoing efforts will encourage others to look forward into the future with positive thoughts.

Since last post, the focus has been on improving color support on multiple fronts, and testing the new functionality on color-capable test applications. Last month, we already got gameplay to work in KYE, and now two more games are starting to give good results; Railroad Tycoon and Prince of Persia.

Font rendering & window widgets

One important part missing from KYE (and all apps in general) was the font rendering. This was visible as the absence of menu items and window titles, which works now for the basic cases:

Also the window widgets finally work, which can be seen in the above screenshot as the goAway box is visible in topleft corner of the Window. The WDEF 0 supports all ‘wctb’ parts now as the original System 7 WDEF did, and colorizes them using a method which should visually give nearly equal results.

At the time of writing this, text rendering in color mode only works for non-styled, and non-scaled text. The styling requires use of an extra offscreen buffer, which we haven’t yet had time to implement for the color version, and scaling requires stretching color blitter, which is not yet implemented.

Menu, Dialog and Alert color tables

As the basic text rendering works now, one interesting game to try it out with is Railroad Tycoon, because that game utilizes heavily custom color tables for menus, windows, dialogs and alerts:

The above screenshot demonstrates all of those features in one picture:

• The blue menus are colorized using ‘mctb’ resources
• The red dialog background comes from ‘dctb’ resource (which is equal to both ‘actb’ and ‘wctb’ resources in both structure and usage)
• The white text in labels (and red background for them) comes from ‘ictb’ resources

Color ‘PICT’ Pictures

Another new feature is the (partial) support for color pictures, that is, PICT resources containing pixmap data in addition to 1-bit bitmap data and methods for controlling the color-specific features in CGrafPorts. With a couple opcodes improved with color support, we got this:

• 

• 

• 

• 

The picture data reading and blitting works nicely, except that the Railroad Tycoon logo has some glitches on left and right edges. It might be related to unfinished region clipping code, but I suspect we might also need to double-check the alignment handling. The main menu in Railroad Tycoon looks a bit messed up at the moment, as the pen pattern setting is probably having some minor issues (it should have solid black pattern, but defaults to 50% gray-dither pattern at the moment).

And the Glider 4.0 main screen also works now with the picture rendering code:

Palette Manager

One thing that was a bit off in the Railroad Tycoon intro and main menus was also the color table, because the game actually uses a custom palette for a nice sepia tone. This meant that next up was the implementation of Palette Manager, as up until now only the default system color lookup table (‘clut’ resources for individual color depths) was used to colorize everything.

Tolerant colors

The first use case, as mentioned above, was Railroad Tycoon, which was a bit easier to deal with, as it uses ‘tolerant’ colors in its palette. The palettes in the game are actually 16-color palettes, replacing the entire color lookup table, but they work also nicely in the 256-color mode which we tested:

• 

• 

On the left, you can see that the skin and map have highly ‘carroty’ orange shade, while on the right, with correct palette, they appear in nice sepia tones as intended. We also added a small palette debug feature to show state of color lookup tables. In this case, the ‘tolerant’ colors replaced the closest matches in the system ‘clut’, making it appear nearly same.

Animated colors

Another game which uses palettes heavily, is our beloved Prince of Persia game. Unlike Railroad Tycoon, PoP uses actually ‘animated’ colors, as it depends on AnimateEntries/AnimateEntry to do color animation, AND nice fade-to-black palette effect.

• 

• 

• 

The above screenshots show the progress made during ‘animated’ color implementation. There were a lot quirks and stumbles along the way, but here are key findings of Palette Manager regarding Prince of Persia:

• It uses ‘animated’ palette entries to do color animation (fade-to-black, twinkling stars, flash effects)
• The black & white entries of palette are manually set by the game as ‘tolerant’ to allow mapping them to correct black & white at indices 255 and 0 respectively
• The game maps each of the 200+ colors dynamically to the ColorTable indices using PmForeColor, and polling the resulting color index
• It appears to convert the images itself to correct indices using the mapping data it gathered
• The CopyBits calls to blit graphics depend highly on a “same bit-depth, same color table seeds and uncolorized” optimization, where we skip creation of color translation table in the blitter. This is also one part which requires the black to be mapped correctly at index 255, as it allows detecting that using combination of white background (index 0) and black foreground (index 255) skips the need for colorizing

The game almost works now, and is actually playable, but encountered a strange crash inside VBL handler during the first level (VBL queue got corrupted, the screenshot above is from the moment when the crash happened). We need to investigate that further in the near future.

Prince of Persia color intro video

To celebrate the advancements made in M.A.C.E., we made a short video of how the color version of emulator looks like when running Prince of Persia:

Note that the bottom-right corner shows the rather ‘hacky’ palette debugger, which nicely demonstrates how the game is using AnimateEntries to do color fades & effects.

Next steps

There are a lot of things still to do, but the progress seems promising. For example, we need to get menus to actually work (the saving & restoring menu background is not yet adapted to support color mode), text rendering needs the support for styling, QDExtensions needs desperately GWorld routines, region blitter needs to be finished, etc. This is a short breakdown which is blocking what test apps:

• Glider 4.0: Needs CopyMask, etc.
• Indy 3: Needs TestDeviceAttribute, etc.
• Siege of Darkwood: Needs FillCRgn, etc.
• Crystal Quest: Needs blitter improvements, etc.
• Railroad Tycoon: Needs font styling, CopyMask, etc.
• Civilization: Needs GWorld routines
• Wolfenstein 3D: Needs GWorld routines

When we get those tasks to advance, we should be able to run more color games in the near future. Stay tuned!

Full list of changes since last post

2020-03-18 03:28:52 +0200 • Implement colorizing srcBic pixel blitter
2020-03-18 03:27:51 +0200 • Implement AnimateEntry (used in PoP flash effect)
2020-03-18 02:29:02 +0200 • Tweak debug palette display
2020-03-18 02:27:32 +0200 • Implement SetEntryUsage (part of the PoP fixes)
2020-03-18 02:24:11 +0200 • No color translate if seeds match (fix PoP colors)
2020-03-18 02:19:39 +0200 • Implement AnimatePalette
2020-03-17 19:40:11 +0200 • Fix MakeITable buffer size bug at 5-bit resolution
2020-03-17 02:14:27 +0200 • Fix Entry2Index for animated palette entries
2020-03-17 01:09:16 +0200 • BIG PaletteMgr commit - first ActivatePalette pass
2020-03-17 01:05:39 +0200 • Implement (most of) SetEntries Color Manager call
2020-03-17 00:03:48 +0200 • Use TheGDevice defaults in MakeITable w/ zero args
2020-03-12 22:01:48 +0200 • 8bit clut debug overlay (to debug Palette Manager)
2020-03-12 21:56:06 +0200 • Implement (most of) PmForeColor/PmBackColor
2020-03-12 19:11:35 +0200 • Implement (most of) Entry2Index
2020-03-12 19:09:51 +0200 • Handle both index & sequence cluts in video driver
2020-03-12 17:25:54 +0200 • Add some missing color QD error numbers
2020-03-12 17:24:56 +0200 • Implement Index2Color in Color Manager
2020-03-11 03:19:45 +0200 • Update trap generator source CSV file too
2020-03-11 03:19:24 +0200 • Implement (most) of ActivatePalette (no updte yet)
2020-03-11 03:18:39 +0200 • Fix IODone invocation for SlotVideo DRVR driver
2020-03-11 03:17:46 +0200 • Fix byteswap bug in Color QD PortList insertion
2020-03-11 03:16:47 +0200 • Switch SetPalette to NSetPalette to use SInt16 arg
2020-03-11 03:16:25 +0200 • Implement (most) of SetPalette (no update yet)
2020-03-11 00:58:34 +0200 • Implement DisposePalette
2020-03-10 04:58:59 +0200 • Clear TmpResLoad at SetResLoad exit
2020-03-10 04:58:16 +0200 • Add empty stub for SetEntryUsage & AnimatePalette
2020-03-10 02:34:26 +0200 • Add gestalt function for 'vers' selector
2020-03-10 02:33:55 +0200 • Fix plotting of color icons in Dialogs
2020-03-10 02:32:49 +0200 • Add dummy SetEntries to Color Manager
2020-03-10 02:32:25 +0200 • Add PaletteDispatch & dummy Entry2Index & HasDepth
2020-03-10 01:52:01 +0200 • Add color QD old-style pattern patXor rect blitter
2020-03-10 01:51:09 +0200 • Add cmake JSON config for wolfenstein 3D
2020-03-10 01:10:52 +0200 • Update QDExtensions selector source csv too
2020-03-10 01:10:20 +0200 • Fix bug handling of version opcode in DrawPicture
2020-03-10 01:09:36 +0200 • Fix signatures of QDExtensions selectors
2020-03-10 01:08:09 +0200 • Add dummy SetCCursor for Glider 4 and Civilization
2020-03-10 01:07:09 +0200 • Add dummy HMGetHelpMenuHandle and Help Mgr module
2020-03-09 23:47:50 +0200 • Add $AB03 trap for 32-bit QuickDraw detection
2020-03-09 23:46:39 +0200 • Add cmake config for Color VETTE!
2020-03-09 22:21:59 +0200 • Partial DrawPicture bits opcode $9x color support
2020-03-09 22:13:15 +0200 • Add empty dummy MakeRGBPat placeholder
2020-03-08 21:32:21 +0200 • Make PICT opcodes $00 through $0B color-compatible
2020-03-08 21:29:45 +0200 • Fix WDEF 0 forecolor bug in monochrome mode
2020-03-08 03:03:28 +0200 • Support control colors in 'ictb' resouces also now
2020-03-08 03:00:51 +0200 • Add color QD Std/Fill/Frame/Paint/Erase/InvertOval
2020-03-08 02:41:23 +0200 • Init DrawPicture playback state for color ports
2020-03-08 02:39:59 +0200 • Fix invalid item index given for text colorization
2020-03-07 17:43:39 +0200 • Restore old colors after menu title draw
2020-03-07 17:14:45 +0200 • Load cctb in GetNewControl & call SetControlColor
2020-03-07 17:13:01 +0200 • Empty stubs for PmForeColor and PmBackColor
2020-03-07 16:48:05 +0200 • Fix swapped fore/background color in menu titles
2020-03-07 16:46:21 +0200 • Implement GetGDevice and SetGDevice
2020-03-07 16:24:30 +0200 • Dialog text & editfield 'ictb' color table support
2020-03-07 15:37:12 +0200 • Paint window background using 'wctb' wContentColor
2020-03-07 15:19:54 +0200 • Fix fallback of missing wctb entry to default wctb
2020-03-07 15:01:12 +0200 • Temporary placeholder for color desktop painter
2020-03-07 15:00:20 +0200 • Improve color QD CopyBits
2020-03-07 04:49:17 +0200 • Fix CopyBits case for WDEF 0 widgets
2020-03-07 04:02:30 +0200 • Makes text colorization work, but breaks CopyBits
2020-03-07 01:09:07 +0200 • Improve CDEF 0 colorQD support (cctb colorization)
2020-03-06 02:41:55 +0200 • Fix detection of color mode in WDEF 0
2020-03-06 01:57:51 +0200 • Draw colorized goAway box in WDEF 0
2020-03-06 01:44:48 +0200 • Implement partial CopyBits color QD compatibility
2020-03-06 01:03:42 +0200 • Improve WDEF 0 color compatibility (in progress)
2020-03-05 18:45:48 +0200 • First proto of color font renderer (srcOr mode)
2020-03-05 18:44:11 +0200 • Export QDRepeatPixels helper
2020-03-05 18:40:48 +0200 • Fix source scanline alignment bug in color stretch
2020-03-04 00:21:02 +0200 • Fix byte-swap bug in 1-to-32-bit pattern expansion
2020-02-26 22:52:01 +0200 • Extract B&W text renderer into a separate module
2020-02-26 22:49:52 +0200 • Move B&W rectangle blitter code to a new folder
2020-02-26 04:47:18 +0200 • Tweak RS local variables names to avoid conflicts
2020-02-26 04:46:38 +0200 • Abstract StdText for color QD & 255+ char support
2020-02-26 04:42:59 +0200 • Don't allocate storage for debug string in release