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NULL mag Issue 08 05 Feedback
yeah... yeah... yeah... the usual stuff.. you all like the mag, you all
read it, you all worship me!!! :P (not sure about that)... but you ain't
got the time to write any shit for it... shame on you!!! ok... i don't
blame you. i also wouldn't like to mess with a weirdo like me :p~~~
just kidding... or not? who knows... but let's get to the point. i
finally managed to find a better sound engine for the mag. now it's
able to play .xm, .s3m, .it perhaps more... so expect more fucking
awesome tunes!
but... the sound engine, needed more memory! and the mag. engine
reached it's limit, for normal use (no extended mode etc.). so i had
to cut some memory usage from somewhere... hmm... but from where?...
the only stuff that used memory was the pointers which store the
articles when accessed... so i can't touch those... and some big
arrays, that are used to store the ansi stuff for the menus... hmmm...
i wonder what to "cut".
obviously, something had to happen with those arrays. pascal doesn't
like big arrays but i also don't like pointers, cause i also would
have to find another way to store those images. the middle solution
was to decrease the size of the arrays.
but first some programming and ansi stuff, learning... of the 80's :)
the "the draw" (TD from now on), has a very cool feature that exports
an ansi file as a pascal array. this makes the use of ansis inside
pascal programs very easy, but also very memory "hungry". but... the
author of TD (with all his awesomeness) thought of another way, to
make these arrays smaller. so he created the "CRUNCHED" format of the
arrays, which is a sort of, compressed data array. depending the use
of ansis in this pascal/array format, using the crunched format may
save a lot of bytes.
so... i checked my all good SWAG library and found a piece of code,
that can display the crunched format, properly on the screen. the
thing is that i had to search a bit, inside the SWAG archive to find
this... and after finding it, i realized/remembered, that it was the
exact code, that was shipped with the TD archive... :head_on_the_wall:
but... i managed to decrease the memory usage, by some KBs and now the
program/engine runs just fine. oh.. i forgot to mention that i had to
drop that screen flipping effects also :( but who cares... i do
anything for playing good tracks in the mag... the sacrifice of those
effects will be remembered... blah... blah... blah... forgotten all
ready. :)
even the compilation time is down by some ms... :p hahahaha ahhh...
how nice was the old times... when you were pulling your hair off, to
manage to fit all the stuff you wanted inside a disk, an archive, a
.dat file etc.
with all the stuff i managed to fit in the engine and the alterations
i did in the code, i have nightmares that one day, the code will
refuse to compile with an error like "runtime 000: i am full, can't
take any more"... hahahaha...
