Fabien Meghazi wrote:
I really don't know where this "UAE isn't modular" meme is coming frmo.I realize that I never tried to explain what I had in mind. Do you think such a model would be possible for uae ? : - There would be a core for UAE. Everything in the core is crossplatform. This is the playground of amiga hardware gurus. Some plugins are registered to the core, and the core sends and/or receive I/O through the plugins.
I've never understood the need for plugins in an open-source project.UAE (not necessarily WinUAE though) already provides separation between core code, and platform specific output code. There are abstractions for video output, sound output, joystick code, gui code etc. etc. Given how many examples there are of different implementations for various platforms, it should be easy to add additional ones.
If you really wanted to, you could replace one of these platform-specific modules with a plugin interface that talked to an external program, but I don't understand why anyone would want that - it only adds overhead (in case of graphics or sound, probably prohibitive overhead), and it adds interdependencies and compatibility issues. My experience with programs that use plugins (e.g. firefox) is that stuff breaks whenever there's a new major version.
And I don't see what problem is being solved. UAE is open-source, it already has abstractions for all platform-specific things, so you can just modify the emulator and add the functionality where it belongs.
Bernd
