Apple Game Server: Blowing off cobwebs

[BLuRry <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

Now that I have a reliable serial cable for my //c, I have finally taken some time to blow cobwebs off the aged source of Apple Game Server only to find that some things were shamelessly unstable about its bootstrap code.  Not that the process was broken, or that I followed a bad sequence of steps.  It's just that the code that was supposed to be safety-checking the transfer process was failing miserably.  And also the "debug bootstrap" option did very little good in most circumstances for a few various reasons.

Ok, enough of that.  Here are some things that have changed:
+ Debug Bootstrap now stays at a constant slow speed.  This is now the "safety" option if the normal bootstrap operation fails too often.  This will still be a good idea to use for //c computers because the //c firmware is a little wonky about how it handles the serial port.

+ Image conversion now uses Floyd-Steinberg dithering.  This doesn't matter too terribly much for Apple Game Server, but it's going to matter a lot more very very soon for other things.  The image quality is awesome though.

Planned features:
+ Image conversion tool -- you will be able to convert anything (png, gif, jpg, bmp, probably TIFF also) to either a Hi-res, Double-hires or a pseudo-DHGR image.  Pseudo-DHGR uses a combination of DHGR palettes on two video pages such that switching between them creates a higher-color image.

+ Better HGR conversion taking hi-bit into account.  Right now the dithering logic is pretty.. well.. stupid about this.

+ Integration with Jace -- This won't happen right away, but sometime in the future these projects will probably merge.  Jace needs the UI code that AGS has, and AGS needs disk emulation code that Jace has.  Jace was built as a test platform for AGS once upon a time.  Now they need each other to grow into something... perverted.  I don't know all the details but more to follow as time permits.  At the rate I'm going probably sometime later in the year.