[uae] UAE, libSDL, and how to hunt down bugs ...

  • From: "Byron Q. Desnoyers Winmill" <byron@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: uae@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 14:05:16 -0500

I grabbed the sources from CVS last night, and used UAE on the Linux
(2.6.9) framebuffer via libSDL (1.2.8) for the first time.  This
is on a 12" PowerBook G4 (ie. the nVidia framebuffer).  In the
process, I came across a few interesting quirks:

1) UAE crawls up the screen on successive runs on a given virtual
   console.  That is to say I can see 100% of the screen on the
   first run, then 50% on a later run, then 10%, then none.

2) The virtual console (properly) switches palettes when switching
   away from the console UAE is running on.  It does not switch
   back when returning to UAE's console.  While this looks like a
   kernel problem, I don't recall seeing it with MOL.

3) Switching consoles while UAE is loading seems to muck up I/O
   royally.  For example: switching away from UAE's console and
   moving the mouse may result on UAE's output on the current
   virtual console.

4) Doing a 'kill -9' on UAE leaves the keyboard (on UAE's console)
   in a completely unusable state.  You cannot even switch to
   another console and funny characters pop up for keys like enter.

These problems may be due to UAE, libSDL, or the Linux framebuffer.
Can anybody suggest how to trace down the root cause?  (I'm familiar
with C and gdb, so you are free to throw technical archanity at
me.  I just don't have enough experience to figure out how to tackle
these problems though.)

Byron.

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