Do we really need the 1/8" or so of plastic sleeving around the pins (on the underside of the board)? Surely the pins should be the same as those found on the VBXE adapter board, allowing the PCB to sit flush with the top of the CPU socket. This would allow the unit to be socketed on an XL, the board sitting too high otherwise. I certainly wouldn't want to remove the CPU socket on an XL and solder this directly to the motherboard. A simple design change would - I suggest - avoid the need for this.

Thanks! :) But what is the significance of :5 and :2? They look like macro parameters.

The ability to indent STRUCT elements is most welcome.

Hmmm... I wonder where Lotharek got his inspiration for his design...

http://www.atari8.co.uk/sio2sd/

Zaxon - please post some of these photos at AA. The case and label look superb!

Heh... six months for the first beta, I'd say. There's still a lot to do. :)

First demo:

http://www.atari8.co.uk/downloads/gui_10_06_11.zip

Guidelines and notes:

•Run this with BASIC off and no carts present (SDX users use "X GUI.XEX"). You can boot the file with an XEX loader (for example, in an emulator), since it doesn't yet require DOS.
•You need a mouse on port 2.
•Use File->New to open more windows on the desktop. They're all called "C:>*.*" at the moment.
•Use Tools->Hide Mouse to toggle mouse pointer hiding when doing redraws. When the option is ticked, the mouse pointer will disappear and flicker, etc. Personally I can hardly tell the difference performance wise.
•Single-click registering is very slow: this is just a tweaking issue I was too tired to rectify this evening. To bring a back window to the front or use the maximize button (which doesn't toggle yet), you'll need to hold the left button down for a good second.
•You shoudn't need to single-click a back window before dragging its scroll handle or size box, etc, but you do at the moment. This is because I haven't finished the buffered event pipe yet.
•You can't close windows down yet.
•The desktop icons aren't "live" yet (i.e. they don't do anything).
•Don't be surprised if you manage to make a window wrap around and create screen garbage. The boundary checks are rough at the moment.
•The border flash is part of some debug code.
•Please no complaints about full desktop redraws. I'm well aware of what needs to be done. There are no back buffers or any "smart" redraws at the moment. That comes later.
•There are several really terrific bugs just waiting to be discovered.

There's a very odd bug which I need to track down which creates all kinds of problems when new code gets inserted or old code removed. I figure there's some rogue write going on in RAM which does or doesn't upset something important depending on the size of the code. Gonna be fun tracking that one down.

I've probably forgotten to mention some other salient points. Hopefully I'll get some feedback over the weekend.

I optimized the VBL and slashed a load of cycles out of it this evening: it now uses the font renderer bit-shift lookup table to divide MOUSE_X by 8. I also created a lookup table for the dynamic DLI to save doing computations on MOUSE_Y in relation to the display list. This has probably saved several thousand cycles per second.

Lots of changes in the pipeline, so hopefully this will be the first of many regular updates.

Slight update to the Polish font pack:

http://www.atari8.co.uk/lastword/

Full desktop redraw with icons and labels:

http://youtu.be/EvtD0ye15Yg

I have done, but the error message is confusing. It merely says "READY". :)

Demo by the weekend, with overlapping windows: just need to code up the scrollbar scaling:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Enh5MQaK4sc