03.13.06

Moving toward Beta

Posted in Apple ][ at 1:05 pm by site admin

With school and work, I certainly have not had as much time to work toward the Beta release of GTE as I would have liked. None the less, quite a bit of progress has been made, especially considering the amount of changes that are happening between releases.

The major pieces of work have centered around

  • Documentation
  • Repackaging as a user tool
  • Streamlining the API

When the Beta is released, it will be accompanied by a full set of toolbox-style documentation as well as a FAQ and sample code. Hopefully this will lower learning curve to the point where it will be usable by others.

The conversion to a user toolset was primarily motivated by a request that the library be callable from GSoft BASIC. Since GSoft requires that user libraries be implemented as user tool sets, this choice was, in effect, made for me. A secondary benefit to the conversion, is that I have the opportunity to integrate the library more tightly with the other toolsets. This should enable Desktop programs to use GTE.

Here is a partial list of what has changed so far:

  • GTE is loaded as a user toolset
  • [Create|Destroy] renamed to [New|Dispose] to follow toolbox naming conventions
  • NewSprite and NewTile take locInfo records to specify the pixel data instead of direct pointers. This matches QuickDraw II conventions
  • Sprites and Tiles are now referenced by Handles instead of Pointers
  • The on-screen field geometry is specified by a Rect. This matches QuickDraw II convention.
  • Only two TileMaps are needed, one for BG0 and one for BG1. Separate maps for Fringe and Mask are eliminated.
  • TileMap elements are now 16bits, versus 8bit. The extra space is used to expand the tile range to 512 tiles and incorporate control bits like the SNES graphics subsystem. There are bits to control horizontal flip, vertical flip, priority, and fringe. The BG1 tile map ignores the priority bit.
  • The sprite and tile compilation routines were rewritten in assembly. The compilation times were a significant bottleneck and should be much faster.

I’m not making any promises on a release date, but I expect it sooner than later.