[Coco] Re: Mac OS X Mocha Followup

Brad Grier bradgrier at cox.net
Thu Jan 1 21:57:41 EST 2004


Torsten Dittel wrote:
>>Any suggestions are welcome.
> 
> 
> Well, a thing I hardly ever used was the speed selector (always using
> the "CoCo" setting).

Agreed. I've thought about taking it out and making the "coco" setting 
the default. On the setup tab I'd have advanced cycle count and sleep 
parameters for those determined to fine tune the emulation speed. The 
low resolution of Java's internal clock makes this difficult to do 
automatically - either that or I just can't figure it out. :)

> 
> The "User" speed is quite useless until you see a value (maybe a
> percentage?) you have set.

Yeah, it was sort of a hack to begin with.

> Maybe you should move the speed selector to the "Setup" tab. By the way:
> It's kind of a surprise to find the "Setup" if you press the "Load"
> button (well... it's kind of a surprise too to find a "Shut Down" menu
> pressing the "Start" button... ;-)))

Oops, I fully intended to relabel that button.

> Artifacting could perhaps be selected with a toggling button too (like
> the joystick).
> 
> I still have a great idea for the joytick emulation... :-)

Let me know what you have in mind.

The mouse joystick emulation does need work. I usually just use the 
keyboard. For most games, it's just too difficult to keep the mouse over 
the center area of the applet. Early on, I had some code that required 
you to hold the right mouse button down when playing - when you released 
it, the virtual joystick snapped back to center. This mouse 'dragging' 
was also the only way in Java to get updating mouse coordinates once the 
cursor left the borders of the applet. It actually worked pretty well 
but I thought it was a little strange.

It would be ideal if there was a way to confine the cursor to the coco 
screen. I didn't think this was possible but someone suggested I could 
use the Java Robot class to programmatically control the cursor. I'd be 
shocked if the browser's security sandbox allowed this though.

> Torsten
> 
> 

Anyway, I guess that's why it's still a Beta!

Brad





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