Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 00:22:07 -0400 From: "Philippe Anctil" Subject: [SDL] odd mouse event generated on init The mouse relative and absolute coordinates appear to be always equal for the first mouse event.

Here are patches for SDL12 and SDL_mixer for 4 or 6 channel surround sound on Linux using the Alsa driver. To use them, naturally you need a sound card that will do 4 or 6 channels and probably also a recent version of the Alsa drivers and library. Since the only SDL output driver that knows about surround sound is the Alsa driver, you���ll want to choose it, using: export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa There are no syntactic changes to the programming API. No new library calls, no differences in arguments. There are two semantic changes: (1) For library calls with number of channels as an argument, formerly you could use only 1 or 2 for the number of channels. Now you can also use 4 or 6. (2) The two "left" and "right" arguments to Mix_SetPanning, for the case of 4 or 6 channels, no longer simply control the volumes of the left and right channels. Now the "left" argument is converted to an angle and Mix_SetPosition is called, and the "right" argu- ment is ignored. With two exceptions, so far as I know, the modified SDL12 and SDL_mixer work the same way as the original versions, when opened for 1 or 2 channel output. The two exceptions are bugs which I fixed. Well, the first, anyway, is a bug for sure. When rate conversions up or down by a factor of two are applied (in src/audio/SDL_audiocvt.c), streams with different numbers of channels (that is, mono and stereo) are treated the same way: either each sample is copied or every other sample is omitted. This is ok for mono, but for stereo, it is frames that should be copied or omitted, where by "frame" I mean a portion of the stream containing one sample for each channel. (In the SDL source, confusingly, sometimes frames are called "samples".) So for these rate conversions, stereo streams have to be treated differently, and they are, in my modified version. The other problem that might be characterized as a bug arises when SDL_mixer is passed a multichannel chunk which does not have an integral number of frames. Due to the way the effect_position code loops over frames, when the chunk ends with a partial frame, memory outside the chunk buffer will be accessed. In the case of stereo, it���s possible that because malloc may give more memory than requested, this potential problem never actually causes a segment fault. I don���t know. For 6 channel chunks, I do know, and it does cause segment faults. If SDL_mixer is passed defective chunks and this causes a segment fault, arguably, that���s not a bug in SDL_mixer. Still, whether or not it counts as a bug, it���s easy to protect against, so why not? I added code in mixer.c to discard any partial frame at the end of a chunk. Then what about when SDL or SDL_mixer is opened for 4 or 6 chan- nel output? What happens with the parts of the current library designed for stereo? I don���t know whether I���ve covered all the bases, but I���ve tried: (1) For playing 2 channel waves, or other cases where SDL knows it has to match up a 2 channel source with a 4 or 6 channel output, I���ve added code in SDL_audiocvt.c to make the necessary conversions. (2) For playing midis using timidity, I���ve converted timidity to do 4 or 6 channel output, upon request. (3) For playing mods using mikmod, I put ad hoc code in music.c to convert the stereo output that mikmod produces to 4 or 6 chan- nels. Obviously it would be better to change the mikmod code to mix down into 4 or 6 channels, but I have a hard time following the code in mikmod, so I didn���t do that. (4) For playing mp3s, I put ad hoc code in smpeg to copy channels in the case when 4 or 6 channel output is needed. (5) There seems to be no problem with .ogg files - stereo .oggs can be up converted as .wavs are. (6) The effect_position code in SDL_mixer is now generalized to in- clude the cases of 4 and 6 channel streams. I���ve done a very limited amount of compatibility testing for some of the games using SDL I happen to have. For details, see the file TESTS. I���ve put into a separate archive, Surround-SDL-testfiles.tgz, a couple of 6 channel wave files for testing and a 6 channel ogg file. If you have the right hardware and version of Alsa, you should be able to play the wave files with the Alsa utility aplay (and hear all channels, except maybe lfe, for chan-id.wav, since it���s rather faint). Don���t expect aplay to give good sound, though. There���s something wrong with the current version of aplay. The canyon.ogg file is to test loading of 6 channel oggs. After patching and compiling, you can play it with playmus. (My version of ogg123 will not play it, and I had to patch mplayer to get it to play 6 channel oggs.) Greg Lee <greg@ling.lll.hawaii.edu> Thus, July 1, 2004

Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 14:17:47 -0500 From: Richard Smith Subject: Re: [SDL] Disableing color depth and mode searching > Also, I should add that a quick way to get the desired effect is to > #define BROKEN_MODES on top of the SDL_fbvideo.c file. > Ah yes, I see that looks like that will do what I need. Curious as to why this is a #define and not an enviroment variable like the other settings. I would think that finding cards (or chips) with broken modes would be the norm rather than the execption.

Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2004 21:02:33 +0200 From: "Philippe Plantier (ayin)" Subject: [SDL] Problems allocating large surfaces There are problems when allocating large surfaces using SDL_CreateRGBSurface. When, for example, we try to allocate a surface wider than 16384 pixels, the calculation of the pitch overflows; this leads to a surface that has the w and h flags correctly set, but whose "pixels" buffer is too small. That may lead to heap corruption.

Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2004 15:27:44 +0300 From: Martin_Storsj Subject: Update for dynamic loading of ALSA I sent you a patch a few months ago which enables SDL to load ALSA dynamically. Now I've finally got time to tweak this yet some more. I've added code from alsa.m4 (from alsa's dev package) to acinclude.m4, and made the detection of the alsa library name a bit better. I've also fixed up the loading versioned symbols with dlvsym, so that it falls back to dlsym. I wouldn't say the configure script is complete yet, but this is how far I've come this time, and I'm no expert at those things.

Hmm, this should work a little better. :)

Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 17:14:00 +0200 From: "Eckhard Stolberg" Subject: Controller names in SDL for Windows I'm working on an Atari 2600 emulator for different systems that uses the SDL. Some time ago someone created an adaptor that lets you use your old Atari controllers with your computer through the USB port. Some of the Atari controllers require special handling by the emulator, so it would be nice, if it would be possible to detect if any of the controllers connected to the computer is this adaptor. SDL would allow that with the SDL_JoystickName function, but unfortunately it doesn't work properly on Windows. On Linux and MacOSX this function returns the name of the controller, but on Windows you'll only get the name of the joystick driver. Most joysticks nowadays use the generic Microsoft driver, so they all return the same name. In an old MSDN article (http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/dnarinput/html/msdn_extdirect.asp) Microsoft describes how to read out the OEM controller names from the registry. I have implemented this for the SDL controller handler on Windows, and now reading the joystick name works properly there too.

CoreAudio driver works on Mac OSX 10.1

Audio improvements from Max Horn, including a new CoreAudio driver for MacOSX

Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 11:38:51 -0700 (PDT) From: Eric Wing <ewing2121@yahoo.com> Subject: New OS X patch (was Re: [SDL] Bug with inverted mouse coordinates in I have a new patch for OS X I would like to submit. First, it appears no further action has been taken on my fix from Apple on the OpenGL windowed mode mouse inversion problem. The fix would reunify the code, and no longer require case checking for which version of the OS you are running. This is probably a good fix because the behavior with the old code could change again with future versions of the OS, so those fixes are included in this new patch. But in addition, when I was at Apple, I asked them about the ability to distinguish between the modifier keys on the left and right sides of the keyboard (e.g. Left Shift, Right Shift, Left/Right Alt, L/R Cmd, L/R Ctrl). They told me that starting with Panther, the OS began supporting this feature. This has always been a source of annoyance for me when bringing a program that comes from Windows or Linux to OS X when the keybindings happened to need distinguishable left-side and right-side keys. So the rest of the patch I am submitting contains new code to support this feature on Panther (and presumably later versions of the OS). So after removing the OS version checks for the mouse inversion problem, I reused the OS version checks to activate the Left/Right detection of modifier keys. If you are running Panther (or above), the new code will attempt to distinguish between sides. For the older OS's, the code path reverts to the original code. I've tested with Panther on a G4 Cube, G5 dual processor, and Powerbook Rev C. The Cube and G5 keyboards demonstrated the ability to distinguish between sides. The Powerbook seems to only have left-side keys, but the patch was still able to handle it by producing the same results as before the patch. I also wanted to test a non-Apple keyboard. Unfortunately, I don't have any PC USB keyboards. However, I was able to borrow a Sun Microsystems USB keyboard, so I tried that out on the G5, and I got the correct behavior for left and right sides. I'm expecting that if it worked with a Sun keyboard, most other keyboards should work with no problems.