#34 - Mar 99

Apologies for the length of time between StuChat 33 and this one (and the bad html). Maybe
what I need is two heads then I can get everything I want done actually done. Still, mustn't
grumble. I honestly have not had more than 5 minutes spare since about last September.
Nearly all my waking time is spent at this keyboard working on either Zex or Fantasm, so
with that in mind I've recently upgraded a whole shedload of stuff.

USB and FireWire are probably two of the biggest advances in peripheral technology for years,
even though it can be argued that new serial interfaces, specially on the Mac, are not all that revolutionary,
merely evolutionary. Indeed I believe that ADB at one time was planned (or maybe does?) support
hubs and other networking extension devices.

Anyway, my beloved system is now all USB via a third party PCI card and
hub. This Microsoft Natural keyboard is extremely nice to use (once you get used to the
angle of the keys - took a few days), my LogiTech wheel mouse is superb (run beta 6
of the driver, beta 7 causes my Finder to crash all over the shop) and the
Zip drive is well, a Zip drive.
The great thing about it is that all this stuff came from PCWorld which really is not a
place to go if you want Mac stuff. Just stroll in, pick from 'n' USB peripherals and plug
it in. It just works. With a slight modification to the keyboard driver with a hex editor
one gets the power key and hence NMI and restart et al which for some strange reason
is not configured in the Apple built kbd drivers. Yep, as many commentators have noted,
it is a good time to be a Mac user.

The other thing I've done is moved my Macs' guts into a rather large server case. This is
excellent as it has about 9 drive bays along with plenty of room for extra fans and cards etc.
Took a day and cost about fourty pounds. Finally I added plenty of RAM and the
fastest processor I could get my hands on. It has accelerated turn around times when building
by vast amounts - indeed there's no way I could've managed the output I have over the last
couple of months with my old 604.

Played with 8.6 yet? I have. The speed is impressive, but not so you'd notice at first. As
I understand it (and this could be totally wrong) the interupts are no longer handled
by the emulator but by the native nanokernal. Indeed I once got a kernal dump out of it!
Suprised the poopoo out of me when my machine froze and the aux monitor had a kernal
dump displayed!

Speaking of kernals, about twice I year I take a look to see how Linux is coming along.
After reading all the good stuff on Slashdot I got hold of the latest PowerMac Linux
and KDE. After all the hype over the last six months I was honestly expecting to be
blown away by the integration of the desktop manager and lower level bits - i.e. it
should have been quite usable from all the articles I'd read.
Well it's all a bit optimistic I'm afraid. Seriously. It's not there yet, and until
some control is exercised over interface I fear it will not make it to the desktop.
It's like every single dialog in KDE is written by a different guy who has their own ideas
on interface. I could not find two dialogs that even had the same interface behaviour.
For example the default button highlight done in a consistent way, never
mind consistent position of controls. And drag and drop seems like it doesn't exist. Heck
even copy and paste seemed a little hit and miss and I'm being very generous here. Oh and
it crashed a lot and 8.5 copied files faster. Much faster. Indeed, 8.5 copies files faster
than BeOS.

Talking of which, I really can't be doing with all this "Apple won't give us the
specs" politcal bullshit coming out of Be with regards to G3/4 support. I have lost a lot
of respect for Be over the last couple of months because of this. Sad but true.

What else? Oh, yes, the switch over to lightsoft.co.uk. Man that was work. Really. We've
had some glitches and some down-time but with any luck it should stay up now. I hated it
because it was four solid days work for yours truly - 4 days when I could've been coding
but wasn't (like I'm not now :)) it is nice though, after all this time to finally get it
all together before things got too out of hand; just a shame we couldn't get lightsoft.com,
but there you go.

On the development front, I really really hope Apple don't drop RAVE over OGL. OGL is great
'n all, buzz word compliant for marketing no doubt, but it is designed as an accurate 3d library,
which is not necessarily ideal for games. RAVE on the other hand just fogs out the hardware
a little bit and says "give me yer triangles" - not much loss of speed there given a card to
actually do the rendering.

The features provided by OGL are useful if you don't want to write your own engine, BUT
it's a general purpose engine and as such has to do things I don't want it to do.I wouldn't
be suprised if OGL's 3d maths runs slower than mine (which are optimized for my specific
case). AND AltiVec stands a bloody good chance of making rendering hw look pretty silly
overnight - OK, so AltiVec is not cross platform without a rewrite but then, what is? Besides
good design can eliminate that problem using suitable abstraction methods.

The problem with specific triangle rendering hardware is that the range of effects is
strictly limited. With a software renderer it's not a problem - you just write what you
want. That's what we need - some kind of open hardware design for triangle filling - or
even better a dedicated and well documented second processor coupled to 32 meg of VRAM
specifically for driving the video. Heck, even the Amiga had one!

Which is what AltiVec might provide in an abstract kinda way being able to work on
8 16 bit datums simultaneously without trashing the cache; if you see what I mean?

"May you live in exciting times" goes the old proverb. Well, we do!