Re: XGS/32 v1.4b Released!

[stevementzer@earthlink.net (Steven W. Mentzer)]

>
>I hope not Tom. Many of us PC users are trying to get people away from MS
>products. If people would spend a little time to learn Linux or BSD or even 
BeOS
>the world would be a better place.
>

I use both Linux and Windows NT,9x...

Frankly, Linux has NO place on the corporate or user desktop. In contrast, 
Linux is 100 times more powerful as a network management workstation than NT 
will ever be....

I have used staroffice 5.1. It is pretty cool. But it still requires a great 
deal of retraining to get office personnel to learn it. Yes I speak from 
experience. I have a Linux box at work with StarOffice 5.1 on it. One of the 
windows support staff was assigned to work with it to identify if document 
conversion problems would exist if other clients used StarOffice and we 
continued to use Office97. 

A trained support person, who knows the ins-and-outs of Word, Excel, Powerpoint 
had some considerable difficulty when initially attempting to use StarOffice. 
Application familiarity goes beyond "point and click". It is also a 
look-and-feel issue, and i think that contributed to his lack of understanding. 

This person wasn't a dullard either. If he had difficulty, our user base would 
have been sent into a tailspin.... and frankly our company cannot accept large 
downtimes in productivity...

As a development platform, Linux sucks. Sorry, I don't like to deal with 
makefiles, lousy IDE/Compiler integration and manpages.

Give me a solid IDE like MSVisualStudio or MSVisualBasic with syntax 
completion, and I will jump to linux tomorrow. Right now, Linux development is 
too cumbersome...

You don't have to like MS, but what they did for developers is simply 
wonderful. They gave me the ability to use my skills effectively, in a 
consistent environment, and be able to go home at 5pm, with my work complete, 
so I can spend some quality time with my daughter.

If I wanted to jump 2 years back in terms of development tools, why don't I 
just go back to the days of punchcards... :) Ummm... fortran.


BeOS... Well, that dream died a long time ago. I prefer OS/2 personally, but 
there are no apps. BeOS is stuck in the wrong place. No market acceptance, and 
no good pool of solid applications....

Yes, there are a number of good points about the BeOS. But the fact that I 
cannot run MSWord, Excel, Powerpoint, Visio and all the other apps I take for 
granted on it really limits is usefulness to me...

I am too old to be messing with fringe operating systems... I have kids to feed 
and bills to pay and my skill go where the future lies.... regardless of 
whether Bill Gates is satan in disguise.... :)


>BTW Steve, don't take this the wrong way. I'm glad someone is offering MS
>users an alternative. Out of curiosity, are you using the Direct Draw engine
>or are you doing things by hand?
>

I haven't taken offense to anything.... After nathan left, I stopped fighting 
and arguing. He was the only closeted, devil worshiping,demonic asshole, 
right-wing, holy roller I took offense to...  You have no idea how many lies 
him and his cronies spewed up about me...  The got a few small facts right, but 
99% of the crap out there is a damned lie... 

That is why I discount anything BrutalDeluxe, Henrik, Joe Kohn and a few 
others say. After what they said and try to portay me as, why should I believe 
what they say about anyone else? The facts were distorted. The accusations flew 
. They tried to get lawyers, police and god knows who else involved over a case 
of "guilt by association". No proof. No guilt on my part. But they wanted a 
sacrificial lamb, and they thought I was it... 3 years later, I am here, 
contributing to the Apple II community the best way I know how, and they still 
label me as a crook, even though I have done more for the community in the last 
year than nathan has.... go figure.  I admit, he was a great programmer, but 
his ego got the best of him  :)

Just because of the stance I took on the "non-commercially available" software 
issue, they made me sound like I was smoking crack and handing out copies of 
Appleworks to every Tom (sorry Doc), Dick and Harry who had an apple II and $5 
in cash.

Ok, enough of my rant.... Back to the tech issues...

DirectDraw yep, DirectInput for Joystick emulation, DirectSound is coming 
up.... (still using MM/GDI calls for sound)

This was my first real jump into the DirectX world. And I must say that MS has 
really made it easy for game developers to stop worrying about hardware 
incompatibilities and graphic libraries and start refining gameplay issues.

If you are well versed in COM, and know the rules, DirectX is a powerful ally. 
After programming lots of graphical apps years ago, working in allegro (and 
before that, writing my own generic gfx libs for old svga boards), I can 
honestly say that DirectX cuts out alot of crap...

I use the same function (actually it's a macro set up to call a function in a 
jump table) VID_PlotPixel(x,y,colorindex,colortype) to plot in any video mode 
whether fullscreen, windowed, 8/16/24/32 bit, any resolution and it is pretty 
damn fast... even when pushing 60FPS. The same call is used in all of the video 
update routines... 

The best thing about it is that I didn't have to jump through any GDI bullsh*t 
to get the thing up and running...

BTW: Once i am done, I will propably release the source code to the whole thing 
anyway.... It's not like I can sell it (I didn't write the core), and I don't 
feel like charging a shareware fee for something that the IIgs community 
deserves.

smentzer@pacbell.net