I'm on a mission to make e-uae work good from my sofa on a Sony Bravia LCD
TV, with nothing but a pair of gamepads in my hand and occasionally a
keyboard. The goal is to have as few reaches for the keyboard as possible. I
use MythTV as front-end to my HTPC and the mythgame plugin works perfectly
with e-uae. Here are my current identified problems (some solved, some not):
Problem 1 - Resetting and especially shutting down e-uae using the gamepad
(SOLVED)
Reaching for keyboard (R12+Q) is tedious. I solved this one by hacking
into the sdl/joystick code. A combination of keys is needed so that it is
not reached by accident. I actually tried very hard to do this properly, but
I gave up after a few hours. The qnd solution was to hijack
jd-sdl/joystick.c/read_joy() and keep all the states by myself. I would love
some advise here. Is there already support for this deep somewhere in the
code? I'd love to make a _proper_ patch with some guidance.
Problem 2 - Proper fullscreen (SOLVED)
This one is already solved with a quick and dirty hack to sdl/opengl code.
It actually makes the texture larger in order to stretch the amiga-screen as
large as possible. It is a very ugly hack. I'm very interesting in what
Drummond is doing in this area. ( Hi! :) )
Problem 3 - Insert Disk 2... (UNSOLVED, tonights problem!)
Some games doesn't use secondary drives. Reaching for F12+F1-4 is
acceptable, but using the mouse is not. MythGame automatically senses that
the game has N disks and inserts all into the proper drives. My idea is to
have a combination of keys to cycle the drives. Drive n becomes n+1, etc
(Only cycle drives with diskettes inserted). I will use the code from
Problem 1 here, but I need to find out how to cycle floppys in code.
Tonights challenge! Any hints appreciated.
Problem 4 - Changing input (UNSOLVED)
Some games wants you to use JUST those keys that you conveniently have
mapped to emulate a joystick on keyboard. And some games want to you press
right mouse button when you have a joystick there... My idea here is to
somehow be able to cycle input-system for port0/1 with the gamepads.
Problem 5 - On-Sreen-Display, OSD (UNSOLVED)
Most of these problems could benefit from OSDs. That is, cycling diskettes
in drives or input-systems could really benefit from some feedback to the
user (hey that's me!). A temporary solution perhaps could be to launch KDE's
(or another WMs) OSD functionality. I think KDE has a command-line program
to show OSDs, although this is very far back in memory. I will try to delve
into this ASAP. Perhaps Drummond is thinking about this already, with the
reworked graphics API? I'm thinking OpenGL and transparent stuff :-D
Anyone has any more interesting stuff to add, please do! e-uae with
mythgame is wonderful already and can only become better :-)
BR/D
