Difference between revisions of "OpenTasks"

Let's start by reviewing the current state of affairs. Engines specify during a startup a set of [http://doxygen.scummvm.org/dd/d2e/mididrv_8h.html#0b8636a2c41edcf47a84282ba7a00971 audio output flags]. These flags try to describe the output ''types'' supported by the engine resp. the current game. We then use some (pretty simple and stupid) "detection" method based on these to determine the output ''driver'' to use. (There is no support for output ''devices'' in ScummVM right now, and adding support for this is not part of this task, but of course we won't complain if it happens either.) Unfortunately, this detection does not include all the above mentioned output types, for example it does not allow to specify "Amiga", which recently turned out to be a major problem for the WIP SCI engine, since its Amiga games support both MIDI (in this case, MT-32 MIDI) and Amiga sound output. Now there is no (clean) way of checking whether the user wanted to use Amiga sound or MT-32 MIDI. Next it does directly map to some concrete audio ''driver'' (like ALSA or Windows MIDI for MIDI). This results in an unclean way of checking in the engine what exactly the selected output type is (this might be required to load special music data files for the different output types). To further complicate things, the current "Adlib" music driver is also used to emulate MIDI sound (useful on low end system which don't properly support MIDI output on their own), causing several engines which only use MIDI for audio output, and which don't contain and Adlib data, to still specify the MDT_ADLIB audio flag.

Let's start by reviewing the current state of affairs. Engines specify during a startup a set of [http://doxygen.scummvm.org/dd/d2e/mididrv_8h.html#0b8636a2c41edcf47a84282ba7a00971 audio output flags]. These flags try to describe the output ''types'' supported by the engine resp. the current game. We then use some (pretty simple and stupid) "detection" method based on these to determine the output ''driver'' to use. (There is no support for output ''devices'' in ScummVM right now, and adding support for this is not part of this task, but of course we won't complain if it happens either.) Unfortunately, this detection does not include all the above mentioned output types, for example it does not allow to specify "Amiga", which recently turned out to be a major problem for the WIP SCI engine, since its Amiga games support both MIDI (in this case, MT-32 MIDI) and Amiga sound output. Now there is no (clean) way of checking whether the user wanted to use Amiga sound or MT-32 MIDI. Next it does directly map to some concrete audio ''driver'' (like ALSA or Windows MIDI for MIDI). This results in an unclean way of checking in the engine what exactly the selected output type is (this might be required to load special music data files for the different output types). To further complicate things, the current "Adlib" music driver is also used to emulate MIDI sound (useful on low end system which don't properly support MIDI output on their own), causing several engines which only use MIDI for audio output, and which don't contain and Adlib data, to still specify the MDT_ADLIB audio flag.