![]() Also PocketPC devices getting more and more memory. Discussing bitmap sizes in the times of > 100GB hard disk space is IMHO useless. So there was never a real need on PC's to have a different graphic format. Until now, you can everthing do with bitmaps. Furthermore, the base of Emu48, Win48 is now nearly 10! years old, or better Emu48 base on 10 years old source code. RGB bitmaps are the best supported graphic format in windows. My current beta versions use them already especially for the VGA mode KML background bitmaps.įinally some words to the use of different bitmap formats. But everything change, so the next versions of my PocketPC emulators (Emu42PPC v1.02 and Emu48PPC v1.02) will also support RLE coded bitmaps (a small addition). Because of this the limitation "Win32" in my previous post. Furthermore the PocketPC only supports RGB bitmaps, the RLE decoder is missing. Some words to CreateDIBSection(), I use this function in the PocketPC emulators because the Win32 function CreateDIBitmap() is missing in the PocketPC 2002 SDK. But the disadvantage of this function is the difficult way to get the palette information necessary for high color bitmaps on 256 color devices. The easiest way to load bitmaps is to use LoadImage(). The emulators of my Win32 Emu family use CreateDIBitmap() (used in Emu48 sources / Files.c / Function LoadBitmapFile()), a little bit more high level function than CreateDIBSection(). There are different methods for loading bitmaps under Win32. NOTE: you don't actually need to get the skins package Free42 has two skins built in, so installation is just as simple as before: all you need is the executable and you're good to go. ![]() The latest Free42, plus a separate package containing a few skins, including my adaptation of "ehrling42sl", is now available on the Free42 home page. Here's hoping there aren't too many people still using less than 16 bits per pixel under Windows! (If there are, I'm sure I'll hear about it soon enough!) The X version handles 8-bit screens pretty well, but the code that takes care of that magic still needs to be adapted and transplanted to the Windows version. So, what else is missing? One other thing - true-color skins look pretty bad on 8-bit screens under Windows. Regarding the second limitation: keyboard mapping is the next item on my to-do list once that's done, I'll define extensions to the skin layout format to allow users to customize the mapping. But, if enough people complain (i.e., more than one -)), I'll add support for some 24-bit format - maybe BMP, maybe PNG, maybe both. Regarding the first limitation: it seems to me that the existing Emu42 skins don't suffer noticeably from the conversion from 24-bit BMP to 8-bit GIF they don't use a very large range of colors, so as long as you use some tool that does a decent job of palette optimization and color quantization, the result will look pretty good. The two main limitations at the moment are: the skin bitmaps must be in GIF format, and there's no support for keyboard mapping yet. ![]() The skin format is not compatible with that of Emu42, but it's pretty simple. ![]() Skin support for the Palm is still in the design stages but will hopefully arrive in a week or two. In case you were wondering when the skin support in Free42 would ever get done (and I wouldn't blame you!, I was in a bit of a slump the last month or so), the latest version now has skin support in the Windows and X versions. ![]()
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