Re: [cc65] Atari "tgi" again :)

From: Ullrich von Bassewitz <uz1musoftware.de>
Date: 2005-07-24 16:32:39
Hi!

On Sun, Jul 24, 2005 at 02:32:55AM +0200, Christian Groessler wrote:
> Hmm, this should be quite common. How do other platforms find the drive
> where the driver is located?

While there is a feature to determine a driver name for a mode, I have found
that is not a good idea to use this feature in most cases. This insight is the
reason, why the TGI api has a tgi_load() function in addition to
tgi_load_driver(), but all other loadable driver apis just have
xxx_load_driver().

tgi_load has several problems:

  * Different platforms do have different graphics modes. This means that just
    loading a driver by specifying a resolution will not work across platforms
    anyway (with very rare exceptions). On the other side, if just one
    platform is supported, and one knows the resolution, he does also know the
    driver which is needed, so the additional translation step, resolution ->
    driver name, which is done by tgi_load(), is unnecessary.

  * Depending on the software it is often better to let the user specify the
    driver name by means of a config file or similar. This allows to replace
    the driver later without recompiling the program.

  * Because tgi_load needs a table with all existing driver names, an
    application using exactly one driver pays a high price for nothing.

My suggestion would be to choose a simple solution (use a standard drive or
whatever) and mark the tgi_load() function as obsolete.

Regards


        Uz


-- 
Ullrich von Bassewitz                                  uz@musoftware.de
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Received on Sun Jul 24 16:32:50 2005

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