A Better Basic?

Remember way back in August, when I patched up an sdlBasic interpreter for the zipit and mentioned that there was more than one sdlBasic.  Well, there's been some lamenting lately on the zipit IRC that I shoulda picked a different one.  A better basic.  SdlBasic.  It's more shinier, and it comes with sound!  Ok, whatever.

Anyhow, I split the difference between the gp2x and linux makefile settings and compiled a version of the runtime for the zipit.  I still need to package it all up with some better zipitized example programs because it wants to run at 640x480, but the zipit is only 320x240.  The gp2x runtime package came with some patched .sdlbas files for 320x240, but they also had the keyboard controls modified to use the joystick instead.  Once again I split the difference and took the keyboard code from the original beast.sdlbas file and the screen size fixes from the gp2x code.  This is what it looks like with me fumbling around, trying to hold a camera and press the zipit alt-number keys to load the various .mod music samples. 

I think it shows a whopping 25 FPS!  35 if I run it without the music.  Shiny!

Files are here for now.

sdlbasic-iz2s.zip
sdlbasic-iz2s-src.tar.bz2

I Blame the Trees

Still not much happening in the software world.  The real world gets in the way.  We have electricity again, but we also have dozens of downed trees to cut up and remove, which leaves far too little time and energy at the end of the day for a whole lot of this stuff.  Gotta get me a chainsaw.

Anyhow, I did somehow manage to spend a few minutes testing things, trying to identify which lib causes the image display bug in the fltk example programs when the screen is rotated.  The pure microwindows nxview program is able to display pngs, jpegs, and bmps in any orientation so libnano-X is probably ok.  The next layer under fltk is the libNX11 X Windows compatibility layer.  So I took a ride in the wayback machine and dug up the ancient xv sources. 

Ah ha!  This program does all sorts of X11 trickery and only shows a blank splash screen when the nano-X server is running rotated. 

But it looks just fine in the native orientation.  So the problem is somewhere in libNX11.  Quite possibly in the cliping functions used by both FLTK and xv.

At this rate I should have it solved by Christmas.  I just hope it doesn't snow again for a while...

Update:

Apparently nxview has trouble with alpha blending.  Here it is in the native screen orientation.  The edges of the dice in the alphademo.png image blend nicely with the background color of the window.

And here it is with the -L orientation.

No blending!  I don't believe nxview uses libNX11 so that places at least some of the problems in libnano-X.

2nd Rate Utilities

This has not been a particularly fun week.  Winter arrived a wee bit early this year with a foot of sticky wet snow that plastered our third world electric grid, just recently recovered from the previous hurricane destruction.  Once again the local utilities proved to be not quite up to the task of restoration.  It's been a long, long 9 days so far without power and with temperatures most nights well below freezing.  Needless to say, all software projects are currently on hold. 

I did manage to get online (for a couple of minutes) only to find an email from my ISP announcing their nefarious plan to delete all my web files within a few short weeks.  Nice.  The Zipit Z2 Goodie Bag is now homeless.  Oh well.  The current location wasn't all that convenient with it's relatively tiny 20MB partitions.  It looks like I can get 100MB for files and a wiki for free on google sites, so it'll probably be moving there once the power company gets me some electricity.  And maybe I'll cancel cable TV to teach that ISP a lesson.  I haven't really missed it.  I just wish I could do the same with the local power monopoly...