[movec]

Originally Posted by emiespo

As I said, I'm writing my own CDXL engine to both understand how it works, and make games out of it. Once it will be in a decent state, I plan to release it as open-source, so other people can possibly make / port more games to the Amiga. There's a Java UI that allows to define the boring bits of logic / moves, etc.

Sounds great. I already have a new version 1.1.0 almost ready that will generate standard CDXL files by default. Padding will still be available as an additional option.

AGABlaster is optimized for AGA systems because I was curious how well the original AGA architecture would support video display with its 64bit graphics access mode. However, the most distinctive feature is probably that AGABlaster skips graphics data on disk, if it is displaying a video on an Amiga that has not enough i/O bandwidth. In this case it only reads the frame header and the audio data, but skips in some frames the graphics data to maintain a smooth video display rate. Hence, the audio should always be perfect, only the frame rate is reduced to the bandwidth of the system. And for 32bit disk controllers it turned out that 32-bit alignment is important otherwise the driver realigns the data which reduces the framerate. That's where the padding comes from, because this was an easy way to make this work. However, the audio chunk can also be 32-bit aligned by adjusting the frequency and that's what the next version 1.1 will do by default.

Originally Posted by emiespo

So I can certainly cope with custom CDXLs, although initially to be sure my player was behaving correctly I was also testing with standard CDXLs found online.

The were 2 reasons for 'custom' mode: one was the alignment, the other was the 24-bit graphics mode. However, with version 1.1 AGABlaster will simply use by default full color palettes according to the number of planes, and then it is either a multiple of 2 or 3, depending whether it is 12 or 24 bit colors. So there is no extension necessary.

Originally Posted by emiespo

My ultimate goal is to also add some RLE compression to the format, as with good quality and 12fps, it goes well beyond the DMA capacity of a CDTV (or even a CD32, but on a 68020 the CPU should be able to compensate). I think using optimised asm, a 68000 with fast-ram should be able to cope with it.

I am looking forward whether you get a better framerate - you gain in I/O speed but you have an overhead because of the decompression, so this will be interesting. Originally AGAConv was called animedit because it added audio to anim files (supporting delta encoding).

Originally Posted by emiespo

Second topic: in order to compile Agaconv on MacOS, I had to add a OSLayer class for it + fix a couple of minor things (compiler on MacOS was complaining about missing includes). Will try to make a patch / bug / merge request next week if I got time.

Sounds great! I was hoping that people would pick up the OSLayer design and add the respective I/O features for their favorite system.

cheers!