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Spliner.doc
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1992-12-06
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*
This document describes `Spliner' 1.17, a freeware spline screen
blanker commodity for the Amiga.
Copyright © 1991,1992 Tom Rokicki and Sebastiano Vigna
The birth of `Spliner'
***********************
Tom Rokicki's `Mackie' is one of the most well-known and most
beautiful utilities for the Amiga. It has two separate functionalities:
it's a blanker which draws wonderful splines, and a powerful hot-key
manager.
What I did was taking out the spline code from the original `Mackie'
sources and encapsulate it in a standard Commodity (of course, this
means someone else will have to port the hot-key part...).
Commodities are the new way, designed by Commodore, by which all
special utilities like mouse accelerators, macro expanders etc. should
be designed. This standard, available *only* under Release 2 and
higher, allows easy and customizable control of the interaction of
different utilities. This means, of course, that `Spliner' will work
only under version 2.04 or higher.
In the process of moving to 2.04, some new features were added,
namely programmable pattern change timeout, and the possibily to open
the blank screen in *any* of the modes available on your Amiga.
For the generic use of a Commodity, please refer to the 2.0 manual.
`Spliner' will (more or less) work just like the screen blanker
supplied on the Workbench 2.04 disk.
Gadgets
********
If you activate `Spliner' by double-clicking on its icon, you will
see a window popping up. The detailed list of the available gadgets
follows:
HIDE
QUIT
work exactly like in Commodore's blanker.
TIMEOUT
lets you set the number of seconds after which the screen is
blanked; defaults to 60.
CHANGE
lets you set the time after which the drawing pattern is changed:
set this to zero to go psychedelic 8^); defaults to 60.
CHECK
THRESHOLD
set the auto-disabling of spline drawing under heavy CPU load. If
CHECK is nonzero, every CHECK seconds a high priority task checks
if at least THRESHOLD lines were drawn from the last check. If
this doesn't happen, the screen is completely blanked (no
splines). This feature saves your screen when some CPU-intensive
task (e.g., 3D rendering) is stealing all the CPU power so that
`Spliner' can't draw and a fixed pattern appears on the screen. As
soon as more CPU time is available, `Spliner' will restart to
cycle colors. Moreover, each CHECK seconds `Spliner' re-blanks the
mouse and `ScreenToFront()'s its screen. If you set CHECK to 0, the
control task is not set up, thus gaining about 1K of memory. CHECK
and THRESHOLD default to 8.
CYCLE COLORS
allows you to enable/disable the color cycling (mainly for special
screen modes such as 2024_10Hz).
DMA OFF
enables the DMA disabling. When DMA OFF is selected, instead of
drawing splines `Spliner' will simply turn off the video DMA. This
mode is not particularly nice to see, but frees the Chip bus from
every DMA video access usage. This can have a certain impact on
computationally intensive programs, in particular on a machine
which has only Chip RAM. If, for instance, you're doing ray
tracing on an A600, turning off DMA could really give you an edge.
See Important Notice.
COLOR
allows you to select a specific color to use for spline drawing
when cycling is disabled. The format is a bit rude, i.e.,
R*256+G*16+B, where R,G and B are the four-bit components of the
color. For instance, 4095 is pure white, while 15 is pure blue.
IMMEDIATE EFFECT
blanks immediately (after 1 second) the screen (this feature was
coded by Jean-Michel Bezeau).
The list displayed on the right represents all video modes installed
on your system. This list could also include some modes that aren't
really displayable on your Amiga, but no harm can be done. You can
click on any display mode in order to force Spliner to use that kind of
display when blanking the screen.
Everything that can be selected by a gadget can also be configured
by a tooltypes. See Tooltypes.
Tooltypes
**********
There are five extra tooltypes: `TIMEOUT', `CHANGE', `CHECK',
`THRESHOLD', `DISPLAY', `CYCLE', `DMA', `COLOR' and `BLANK'. The first
six act just like the corresponding gadgets (see Gadgets). Note that
the name you set `DISPLAY' to must be an exact copy of the name
appearing in the window list (up to lower/upper casing). For instance,
`DISPLAY=PAL:Lores-Interlaced' (note that on localized machine, the
name has to be written in the localization language). If you have a PAL
(resp. NTSC) Amiga and you have a real MultiSync monitor, you can even
add the NTSC (resp. PAL) monitor to your system and open the blank
screen with another video frequency! This has no usefulness at all, but
it's amusing. The `CYCLE' and `DMA' tooltypes can of course be set to
`ON' or `OFF'.
`BLANK' lets you specify an hotkey (in the same format as
`CX_POPKEY') which will immediately (after 1 second) blank the screen,
just like the IMMEDIATE EFFECT gadget (the delay is necessary because
otherwise the input event caused by the hotkey would unblank the
screen).
In order to start `Spliner' at power-up, the best thing is to move
its icon into the `WBStartup' drawer, and to set its tooltypes to the
desired values. Don't forget to add the `DONOTWAIT' tooltype, too.
You'd probably also want to set `CX_POPUP=NO'. Another thing to
consider is that since `Spliner' reads the display modes in the
graphical database, you must be sure `Mode_Names' is ran before it. In
order to obtain this, you should add the tooltype `STARTPRI=-120'.
Important Notice
*****************
Some people think that terrific blankers steal CPU time. This is not
the case with `Spliner'. If a task is using the CPU, `Spliner' will
stop drawing. If in particular your application has a hi-res
multi-color screen, the presence of the blank screen will actually
speed up whatever the Amiga is doing, by lessening the DMA contention.
If, moreover, you select the DMA off switch (see Gadgets), you will
definitely gain in speed, but you won't have a terrific blanker any
longer.
Changes
********
From revision 37.8, the mouse is blanked "legally" by opening a
window on the blank screen and using `SetPointer()'. This means that
when the blanker starts the current active window will be deactivated.
This shouldn't however have any side-effect.
From revision 37.12, there is an `About...' menu item, and the
copyright notice is no longer in the window title. The CHECK/THRESHOLD
control were introduced, and the user interface was made
font-sensitive. A comprehensive optimization greatly reduced the CPU
time used while checking the input events (i.e., while the screen is
not blanked). Finally, an important bug fix (the window could have been
closed without `GT_ReplyIMsg()'ing all pending IntuiMessages).
Revision 37.15 fixes a stupid bug (not enough stack size) which was
really difficult to reproduce. Thanks to Alessandro Pelosi at Agemo for
his precise report, and to Martin Taillefer at Commodore for his
precious suggestions: with the new mouse blanking code, Spliner doesn't
deactivate the current window any longer, and in particular it doesn't
deactivate gadgets.
Revision 37.17 introduces the COLOR and DMA switches and support for
some V39 features (like new look menus).
Disclaimer and Author Info
***************************
`Spliner' is Copyright (C) 1991,1992 Tom Rokicki and Sebastiano
Vigna and it's freely distributable as long as all of its files are
included in their original form without additions, deletions, or
modifications of any kind, and only a nominal fee is charged for its
distribution. This software is provided *AS IS* without warranty of any
kind, either expressed or implied. By using `Spliner', you agree to
accept the entire risk as to the quality and performance of the program.
Comments, complaints, desiderata are welcome.
Sebastiano Vigna
Via California 22
I-20144 Milano MI
BIX: svigna
INTERNET: vigna@imiucca.csi.unimi.it
vigna@ghost.sm.dsi.unimi.it
UUCP:cbmehq!cbmita!sebamiga!seba@cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com
...{uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmehq!cbmita!sebamiga!seba
FIDO: 2:332/607.28