Date   : Wed, 06 Aug 2003 21:11:16 +0200
From   : Patrick Kaell <sparc@...>
Subject: Re: BeebEm Development

Hello Dave Gilbert,

> The reason for it only doing 8 bit depths was not due to the origin of
> the code but was that maintaining palettes without a
> hardware palette is rather expensive, and back in the days of my P90
> (now relegated to my firewall) it was cycles which were not needed and
> anyway most people didn't run 24bit for their main displays.
> My arc emulator does have support for true colour displays;
> the X interface code for that can be found at:
>    
> http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/arcem/arcem/ 
> X/DispKbd.c?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/plain

Thanks for the information.

I have one question to all the people reading this: Is the solution to  
start automatically a separate X server to run BeebEm a good idea? I  
think that having BeebEm running on a X server without any window  
manager a good thing since you don't interfere with your window manager  
while pressing some key combinations. Secondly, you are much closer to  
the look&feel of a real Beeb if you don't see any window borders.

I already play with the idea to write a GTK utility to configure BeebEm  
online. You could swap disc images with the GTK utility without leaving  
BeebEm. The utility would communicate with the BeebEm process running  
on the other X server using a socket link.

Any ideas?

> Thanks for keeping it alive; its more than I've done to it for some
> years!

I have just done some humble modifications. But I will do a bit more in  
the near future... ;-)

Patrick