Author Topic: User Library plans for 00.016.000  (Read 5251 times)

Jubatian

  • Global Moderator
  • Newbie
  • *****
  • Posts: 36
    • View Profile
    • Jubatian's blog
User Library plans for 00.016.000
« on: February 01, 2015, 05:44:58 PM »
Well, "large changes" again, this time the User Library is what will undergo some reforming.

From specification 00.013.000 to today (00.015.003) basically the User Library was introduced and incrementally developed along with some very basic testing, and fixing various bugs in the RRPGE emulator code (a lot less than expected). The User Library is basically an API for game & application developers, which is placed on top of the core RRPGE implementation (either emulator or physical hardware) as a binary image in the upper end of the application code space. As of now, it provides basic convenience functions, a sprite system, and support for realizing tile maps.

The most important thing which became apparent that a large part of the User Library is actually object oriented (it was intentional), with some parts introducing a sloppy interface concept (unintentional). The changes will aim to fix this problem by defining a simple interface concept which should provide an adequate general purpose solution. By this, a lot of User Library functions will change more or less.

The User Library will also be extended to 8 KWords (instead of 4 KWords as of now). A fully functional printf with the concepts I want to introduce with it (character readers, writers, UTF support) just doesn't fit already, and there are still a few components which could be useful in this library (like some common uses of the Accelerator and some API for sound and music).