Welcome (was: PSound & ppconfig.h)

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>]

Henrique Seganfredo wrote:

>Hi folks.....I am a CS student from Brazil and I found the PP project quite
>interesting....

Thanks.

>currently I am developing a simple real mode x86 game
>library (video, sound, efx and sprite routines).....much of the stuff is
>damn hardware dependent...I am quite interested how you guys are dealing
>this in Linunx since it has a abstraction layer to ensure portability....is
>PP x86 dependent?? 

We hope not ;)
No, seriously - theoretically it shouldn't care about the hardware platform
at all. We don't access the hardware directly, we properly abstract away
type sizes and endianness, and don't use assembly.
But we haven't tested it on architectures other than x86 yet (I assume you
don't have some old SPARC or Alpha box at home? ;)

>how you guys are addressing the sound stuff? it is often timer dependent

Paul will have to answer that. I'm totally incompetent in that area ;)

>another question...are you guys focusing on the hardware->software 
>interface (basic I/O functions for the different game devices and file

No hardware access - that's the duty of drivers. File formats: yes.

>formats) or in the game development itself (animation, sprite routines, 3D,
>tiles, data structs) ??

LibPenguinPlay doesn't have any gfx code, and we don't plan to add that
soon. LibPP is intended as collection of the things missing in other
libraries - and there are already tons of (good) gfx libs out there.

Right now LibPP consists of:
  * PenguinFile: portable file handling & automatic support for archive
    files (and later some more stuff).
  * PenguinSound: fairly high-level sound management

>more this.....what are the expected speed ratio compared to MSDOS
>equivalent functions? won't it be slower because of the Linux abstraction
>layer???

Usually it will be faster:
 - The added abstraction code doesn't make things much slower. In fact the
   slowdown usually is barely noticeable - if at all.
 - The libraries you use on Linux are quite well-optimized.
 - You (almost) automatically get the benefits from hardware acceleration
   (if present) - that's a *big* speedup. In DOS that's next to impossible
   to do.
 - Linux is faster than DOS ;)
   Really. The file system caching in Linux is orders of magnitude more
   efficient than the one of DOS, as it the virtual memory manager and the
   application loader etcetc.


>are you guys open for comments, adds, testing and contribution in this

Sure :)


	Christian
-- 

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