Re: [MiNT] Re: MiNTOS versions (macmint)

[Johan Klockars <rand@cd.chalmers.se>]

> > > The really nice thing about it is that nearly everything that runs on MiNT
> > > will run on MacMiNT with very few changes. The exceptions are of course things
> > > like AES (not that I really know what this is...:) that access hardware
...
> If MacMiNT had a VDI it should be quite possible to run e.g. N.AES on it.

Yes.

> I don't know much about Macs, but I believe it should be possible to write
> a fVDI-driver that use the Mac's graphics subsystem (QuickDraw?).

If it's possible to get at QuickDraw from MacMiNT, then that should not
be very hard to do. Even accessing the screen directly would be an option,
considering that fVDI has the most important parts of a 16 bit driver
available as C code.
It's quite simple to get a basic fVDI device driver running.

The main problem would probably be to get mouse and keyboard I/O working.
All normal Atari compatible machines already have a VDI and rather than
duplicate those routines, fVDI currently forwards such calls to the old
VDI (fVDI takes care of actually displaying the mouse pointer, though).
At some point in the future those tings will of course be added to
fVDI as well, but right now I'd rather not worry about it.


By the way, just a couple of hours ago I finally got my Eclipse board
installed and it worked on the first try!  :-)
The mach64 fVDI device driver works reasonably well, but a few important
functions have not yet been modified to work with the Eclipse/RageII
(they're fine on the NOVAs, but the use of the memory space is different).
Hopefully, these things will be cleared up in the next few days so that
I can get back to work on the things that are still missing from fVDI.


As always, anyone who's interested in helping out with any aspect of
fVDI is very welcome to get in touch with me. If you try it out, _please_,
let me know what problems, incompatibilities etc you run into.
Don't think that someone else has reported a problem. Given the 'huge' (Not!)
amount of feedback I get on this project, the chance is about 99.99% that
noone has told me about it.
(As always when it comes to my software, look for the latest beta versions
 rather than the real releases (which donä't happen very often.)

-- 
  Chalmers University   | Why are these |  e-mail:   rand@cd.chalmers.se
     of Technology      |  .signatures  |            johan@rand.thn.htu.se
                        | so hard to do |  WWW/ftp:  rand.thn.htu.se
   Gothenburg, Sweden   |     well?     |            (MGIFv5, QLem, BAD MOOD)