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From: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU (Six o'clock News)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: The next screen saver feature?
Message-ID: <28057@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 22 Sep 90 00:52:58 GMT
References: <13599@hydra.gatech.EDU> <19100001@yoyodyne>
Reply-To: bruce@cory.Berkeley.EDUIn article <19100001@yoyodyne> liberte@yoyodyne.ncsa.uiuc.edu writes:
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 35

>Screen fading, a la Lisa, could be done easily with color
>table manipulation.  
From: bruce@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Bruce Burkhalter)
Path: cory.Berkeley.EDU!bruce

Actually gamma table dimming works a little better but not all monitors
support it.  Clut dimming is a little chunky when it dims.

>If the screensaver selected by the user cannot run due to heavy
>memory requirements, an alternate (from a list) should be used instead.
>Maybe AD or Pyro do this already.

Both Pyro! and AD will choose different modules if there is not enough
memory.  Pyro! has a scheme of "primary" and "secondary" modules.  AD
defaults to its builtin module.

>I just glanced at the After Dark programmers packet (whatever it is
>called - it belongs to someone else) and noticed that modules may be
>written in a number of different languages.  However, it appears that
>global vars are not allowed (maybe some languages support globals?),
>and debugging would be difficult since there is no skeleton to run your
>module within the programming environment.  Is this true?

Globals aren't allowed in code resources in many development systems.
Think C allows them, though.  I wrote an AD shell for Think C to provide
source level debugging.  It isn't "shippable" but it works ok.  Hopefully
I can polish it up and post it.

>Dan LaLiberte
>National Center for Supercomputing Applications
>liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu

Bruce Burkhalter
After Dark Project Manager
Berkeley Systems, Inc.