@#
@# This is the source for the recent changes list, in a weird custom format.
@# Read makedoc.c for a description of what is going on...
@#
@<html>
@<head>
@<title>Allegro Changes</title>
@<body>
@startoutput NEWS

@heading
Changes from 3.0 beta to release (Dec 1997)
<ul><li>
   The pat2dat utility can now import instruments from AWE32 SoundFont files.
<li>
   Optimised the DIGMID patch loader and fixed a couple of bugs.
<li>
   Ove Kaaven fixed the ATI Mach64 driver.
<li>
   The config file can now mention several possible video drivers, using 
   lines in the form gfx_driver=x, gfx_driver2=x, etc.
<li>
   Improved the native SVGA driver helper functions, making it easier to add 
   truecolor support to the register level drivers.
<li>
   Double-clicking on a font object in the grabber now allows you to view 
   the extended characters as well as normal ASCII.
<li>
   Markus Oberhumer corrected a potential problem with the Video-7 
   initialisation code.
<li>
   Markus Oberhumer, Bitland, and Sormuras all sent me mapping tables for 
   the German keyboard layout. Coordination of effort: who needs it? :-)
<li>
   Mathieu Lafon improved the French keyboard mapping.
<li>
   Fixed some bugs in the MIDI voice allocation system.
<li>
   Added a -k (keep names) option to the dat utility.
<li>
   The setup program now uses the ALLEGRO environment variable to locate the 
   keyboard.dat file.
<li>
   Fixed a problem with &lt and &gt characters in the HTML documentation.
</ul>


@heading
Changes from 2.2 to 3.0 beta (Nov 1997)
<ul><li>
   Merged in George's improved instrument parameters for the AWE32 driver.
<li>
   The pat2dat utility can now reduce sample data from 16 to 8 bits (saves 
   space, and the DIGMID driver only uses 8 bits in any case).
<li>
   Added yet another version of the mouse handler, this time in an attempt 
   to make it work more reliably under Windows NT.
<li>
   Frodo Baggins added a mapping table for Portuguese keyboards.
<li>
   Added an external tool "shell" function to the grabber.
<li>
   Added a "box grab" function to the grabber, which uses a color #255 
   bounding box to determine the extent of the sprite to grab.
<li>
   Santeri Saarimaa added a Finnish keyboard mapping.
<li>
   Finished writing the pat2dat utility, and the DIGMID driver is working a 
   lot better now.
<li>
   Mathieu Lafon added support for the Pause and PrtScr keys, and changed 
   the key[] array to a bitfield indicating whether either or both of the 
   normal and extended versions of the key are pressed. This remains 
   compatible with the "if (key[KEY_*])" syntax, but also allows you to 
   distinguish between, for example, the Enter key on the numeric pad and 
   the one next to the right shift key.
<li>
   Fixed a bug in the handling of config variables that don't belong to any 
   section.
<li>
   The makefile now tries to detect and warn people about some of the more 
   common installation errors.
<li>
   The HTML version of the documentation now uses a short .htm file 
   extension if it is built on a system with LFN disabled.
<li>
   Keyboard mapping files now only bother saving the entries that differ 
   from the default US mapping. This makes the maps a great deal smaller!
<li>
   Changed the default font and keyboard mapping tables from DOS codepage 
   437 to the standard ISO charset (first part of Unicode). If you have made 
   a keyboard config using the old codepage it will need to be updated, but 
   don't worry, I have a script that can do this very easily.
<li>
   Fixed a bug in the detection of font formats (fixed or proportional) when 
   grabbing from a bitmap font.
<li>
   Added an editable loop point to the MIDI player (thanks to George for 
   sorting out how to do this...)
<li>
   Rewrote the mouse handler to track the position itself, using only the 
   mickey counters from the int 0x33 driver. Hopefully this will fix the 
   problem with buggy Logitech drivers...
<li>
   Added a mouse_pos variable containing both the X and Y values in one 32 
   bit location, to allow a single instruction read during tight polling 
   loops.
<li>
   The grabber now supports multiple selection, and has a new "ungrab" 
   command that copies from a bitmap object into the scratch buffer (you can 
   use this to generate palettes from truecolor images, or to re-grab a 
   smaller area from the image).
<li>
   Added multiple selection abilities to the GUI listbox object.
<li>
   Theuzifan improved the cpu detection for Cyrix chips.
<li>
   Mathieu Lafon added a French keyboard mapping.
<li>
   Richard Mitton wrote an example program demonstrating how to fake a 12 
   bit truecolor display on an 8 bit card.
<li>
   Michal Mertl added a routine for generating optimised palettes for a 
   specific truecolor image.
<li>
   Optimised the getr/g/b() functions. Converting between different color 
   depths should be much faster now...
<li>
   Scott Harrison added code to detect OpenDOS, and use the i_love_bill mode 
   if their version of EMM386 is in use.
<li>
   Added some new example programs.
<li>
   The makedoc utility now converts between the DOS and Windows extended 
   character sets when producing HTML output files.
<li>
   Ettore Perazzoli made a spectacular optimisation to the linear -&gt 
   mode-X blitting function.
<li>
   Added a grid option to the dat utility, to specify which region of a 
   bitmap you want to grab.
<li>
   Fixed a bug in blitting truecolor bitmaps onto mode-X destinations.
<li>
   Fixed a bug that was preventing the Adlib volume from being changed when 
   only MIDI sound drivers were installed.
<li>
   The grabber can now be run in video modes other than 640x480 (it doesn't 
   look very nice in lower resolutions, though :-)
<li>
   Added a new fake scancode for the extended / key (the one on the numeric 
   keypad) so that the two keys can be distinguished from each other.
<li>
   Joaquin Hierro Diaz made a mapping table for Spanish keyboards.
<li>
   The setup utility can now be used to select a keyboard layout and to 
   calibrate the joystick, as well as for the sound hardware.
<li>
   Moved some of the documentation to different locations, so hopefully 
   people will now be less likely to miss the faq.txt, and to bring it 
   closer in line with the standard GNU distribution format.
<li>
   Better keyboard configuration system. There is now a proper utility for 
   setting up the mapping tables, the tables can be read from external 
   files, and it properly supports the alt-gr and accent escape keys.
<li>
   Menu items can now be disabled, have check marks next to them, and 
   support right aligned text eg. for displaying keyboard shortcuts, there 
   is a new "void *dp" field in the menu structure, and the click callback 
   routines can now use the global pointer "active_menu" to determine which 
   option they were called by, if a single routine is shared by several menu 
   items.
<li>
   Peter Palotas added an input callback to the keyboard routines, and event 
   flags to the mouse callback.
<li>
   Added a -pal option to the dat utility.
<li>
   Grzegorz Ludorowski made some new graphics for the demo game.
<li>
   Moved some code to new files and added a bunch of macros so you can 
   remove unused graphics and sound drivers at link time.
<li>
   Fabian Nunez added support for the Logitech Wingman Extreme joystick.
<li>
   Chris La Mantia contributed a d_slider_proc() dialog object.
<li>
   Sean Gugler added a routine for changing the keyboard LED state.
<li>
   George Foot added pause and seek functions to the MIDI player.
<li>
   Added the ability to append datafiles (in fact any files at all) onto the 
   end of your program executable.
<li>
   Merged in the AWE32 driver. Long live George!
<li>
   Can now read RLE compressed TGA files.
<li>
   Added a mouse movement callback function (useful for detecting double 
   click events).
<li>
   Stefan Eilert added support for dual joysticks.
<li>
   Seymour Shlien contributed a routine for drawing justified text.
<li>
   Krzysztof Krzyzaniak contributed a loader for .VOC sample files.
<li>
   Added a rotate_scaled_sprite() function.
<li>
   Now supports the Dvorak keyboard layout.
<li>
   Salvador Eduardo Tropea added a 320x100 VGA mode.
<li>
   Implemented translucent and lit sprite and RLE sprite drawing functions 
   for the truecolor modes.
<li>
   Updated the sound setup utility.
<li>
   The dat utility can now output makefile dependencies for automatically 
   rebuilding the file when any of the source data changes.
<li>
   Fixed some problems with the RGB &lt-&gt HSV conversion functions.
<li>
   Truecolor image loading and grabber support.
<li>
   Phil Frisbie provided some code to detect the CPU type.
<li>
   Michal Mertl added 24 bit graphics modes. Hurrah!
<li>
   Added functions for playing streams of digital audio data.
<li>
   Chris La Mantia contributed a bitmap icon GUI object.
<li>
   Doug Eleveld added a text box GUI object, plus an improved help system 
   for the grabber.
<li>
   Added support for UK and AZERTY keyboard layouts. More can easily be 
   added if you send me the appropriate scancode->ASCII mapping tables...
<li>
   Added get_align_matrix(), qtranslate_matrix(), and qscale_matrix() 
   functions.
<li>
   Added a draw_character() function for using sprites as monochrome pixel 
   masks.
<li>
   It is now safe to pass the same matrix as both input and output to the 
   matrix_mul() function.
<li>
   Paul Bartrum contributed some ellipse drawing functions.
<li>
   Added some callbacks to the MIDI driver, allowing you to hook your own 
   code into MIDI notes or marker events.
<li>
   Added a function to measure mouse movement in terms of mickeys 
   (difference since the last call) as well as in absolute screen 
   coordinates.
<li>
   VolkerOth made the d_edit_proc objects able to scroll, if the string is 
   larger than the available space.
<li>
   Added the ability to distinguish between the left and right Control and 
   Alt keys.
<li>
   Fabian Nunez added support for the extra keys on a Microsoft keyboard.
<li>
   Added void *dp2 and void *dp3 fields to the dialog structure. This 
   ought not to break any existing code, but will let you store a lot more 
   data when creating custom objects.
<li>
   The packfile functions can now directly open and read from datafile 
   member objects, using fake filenames in the form "filename.dat#obj_name". 
   This means that all the Allegro file access routines (eg. load_pcx() and 
   set_config_file()) can now read from datafile objects as well as separate 
   files.
<li>
   Added miditest and digitest programs to allow more rigorous testing of 
   the sound routines and patch sets, and a vesainfo program to check which 
   video modes are available on any given card.
<li>
   Jan Hubicka wrote a faster version of create_rgb_table().
<li>
   The grabber now scales the bitmap preview if the image is too large to 
   fit onto the screen.
<li>
   Jorrit Rouwe provided a new and much cooler set of FM instrument 
   definitions for the Adlib MIDI driver.
<li>
   Added a function to load .IBK patch sets for use by the Adlib driver.
<li>
   Added a wrapper allegro/ directory around the contents of the zip file, 
   so it can now be safely unzipped into the main djgpp directory.
<li>
   Richard Mitton added support for 6-button joysticks.
<li>
   Truecolor (15, 16, and 32 bit) graphics modes.
<li>
   Vastly improved sound routines (more flexible API, now supports up to 32 
   simultaneous voices on the SB, sample-based MIDI playback driver, can 
   reverse samples, volume/pan/pitch sweep effects, MIDI commands can be 
   output on the fly as well as played from MIDI files, and lots of other 
   goodies).
<li>
   It is now possible to update the status of GUI dialogs incrementally from 
   your own control loops, with an update_dialog() function, rather than 
   completely transferring control to do_dialog().
<li>
   Compressed files (including grabber datafiles) can now be encypted with a 
   password.
<li>
   Added a masked_blit() function, that skips zero pixels.
<li>
   Added code to detect being run under Linux DOSEMU, and use the less 
   demanding version of the timer code if this is the case.
<li>
   Added a standardised configuration mechanism. The format for saved 
   joystick calibration information has changed, so existing joystick files 
   are no longer valid.
<li>
   Added a textprintf() routine, which uses a printf() style format string.
<li>
   Added a TexInfo version of the documentation (thanks for the help, 
   Francois!)
<li>
   Jonas Petersen added a save_bmp() function, and support for the OS/2 BMP 
   format.
</ul>

@endoutput NEWS

@heading
Changes from 2.11 to 2.2 (Feb 1997)
<ul><li>
   TBD/FeR added tweaked 320x600 and 360x600 resolutions to the mode-X 
   driver.
<li>
   Matthew Bowie added support for 4-button joysticks.
<li>
   Dave Thomson added RGB &lt-&gt HSV conversion functions.
<li>
   Added a 'freeze_mouse_flag' variable, that can be used to lock the 
   pointer to a specific position.
<li>
   Added a 'key_led_flag' variable, that can be used to prevent the keyboard 
   LED's updating in response to the capslock, numlock, and scroll-lock keys.
<li>
   The midi player now resets midi_pos to -1 when the music finishes playing.
<li>
   Adrian Oboroc wrote an LBM loader.
<li>
   Fonts can now contain characters above ASCII 127.
<li>
   Chris Wigman made a better intro animation for the demo game.
<li>
   Added translucency, color blending, and lighting routines (based on code 
   by Owen Embury and ideas by Nathan Albury).
<li>
   Added 3d math and matrix manipulation functions.
<li>
   Added texture mapped and gouraud shaded polygon drawers.
<li>
   Tim Gunn contributed code for reading and writing TGA files.
<li>
   Fixed clamping problems with rotating non-circular sprites.
<li>
   Added scrollbars to the GUI listbox object.
<li>
   Seymour Shlien wrote a bezier spline drawing function.
<li>
   Added fixed point fadd() and fsub() functions, which check for overflow.
<li>
   Added pack_fseek() and chunk manipulation functions to the file routines.
<li>
   Improved datafile structure and grabber program.
<li>
   Wrote a utility to convert grabber datafiles into linkable asm code.
<li>
   Salvador Eduardo Tropea improved the keyboard routines (better handling 
   of extended scancodes, keyboard LED support, capslock and numlock, and 
   alt+numpad input).
<li>
   Fixed the packfile functions and file selector to work with long 
   filenames under win95.
<li>
   Seymour Shlien contributed a BMP reader.
<li>
   Added a hook function to the keyboard code, allowing you to use the GUI 
   code without installing the keyboard handler.
<li>
   Fixed a lockup caused by trying to access non-existent floppy drives.
<li>
   Francois Charton wrote a driver for Paradise graphics cards.
<li>
   Chris La Mantia contributed a radio button GUI dialog object and added a 
   D_DISABLED object flag.
<li>
   Markus F.X.J. Oberhumer fixed the Video-7 scrolling function.
<li>
   Converted the docs into HTML format.
<li>
   Added code to detect Windows NT.
<li>
   Mark Habersack added support for newer Trident chipsets.
<li>
   Did some more work on the VBE/AF driver (it now works, but still doesn't 
   support accelerated hardware features).
<li>
   Fixed bugs in the WAV sample reader and FLIC player.
<li>
   Added special 'windows friendly' mode to the timer code. You can now even 
   run demo.exe under Windows 3.1!
<li>
   Reorganised directory structure, to allow for a Linux version. The output 
   liballeg.a is now found in lib/djgpp.
<li>
   Added support for 8x16 BIOS format fonts.
<li>
   Fixed a problem with overflow when rotating large sprites.
<li>
   Fixed a problem with restoring the text mode screen height after running 
   Allegro programs.
</ul>


@heading
Changes from 2.1 to 2.11 (Nov 1996)
<ul><li>
   Fixed bug in bank.S.
<li>
   install_mouse() now sets the range to (0,0,SCREEN_W,SCREEN_H).
<li>
   install_sound() does not automatically set the volume to maximum.
<li>
   Added ++ and -- operators to class fix.
<li>
   Makefile now copies liballeg.a to lib, and allegro.h to include.
<li>
   Made a few changes to work under LFN=y (if you use unzip or winzip
   instead of pkunzip).
<li>
   Added manifest.
<li>
   Clarified installation instructions.
</ul>


@heading
Changes from 2.0 to 2.1 (June 1996)
<ul><li>
   Mode-X support (thanks to Jonathan Tarbox and Dominique Biesmans for 
   suggesting and then helping to implement this).
<li>
   Compiled sprites.
<li>
   Jonathan Tarbox contributed an FLI/FLC player.
<li>
   Added patterned drawing modes.
<li>
   Added a vertical retrace interrupt simulator.
<li>
   polygon() can now handle concave and self-intersecting shapes. I also 
   changed the parameters a bit. Sorry if this breaks your old code, but 
   it's more efficient the new way...
<li>
   Added stretch_sprite().
<li>
   Wrote a floodfill() routine.
<li>
   More flexible palette fade routines.
<li>
   Added set_volume() to the sound code.
<li>
   David Calvin wrote a sound setup utility.
<li>
   Improved the GUI. Added popup/dropdown menus, joystick input, three 
   button alert boxes, better handling of arrow key focus movement, a new 
   keyboard shortcut object (d_keyboard_proc()), and '&' markers in strings 
   to display keyboard shortcuts. The GUI can also now be used with fonts 
   other than the standard 8x8 default, by altering the global 'font' 
   pointer.
<li>
   Fabian Nunez added support for the CH Flightstick Pro joystick (looks 
   cool: I want one :-) and 3-button mice.
<li>
   The keyboard handler now responds to the state of the ctrl and alt keys, 
   and there is a new simulate_keypress() function.
<li>
   Mark Wodrich added sub-bitmaps, which share their memory with a parent 
   bitmap but can be positioned anywhere within it, and have their own 
   clipping rectangles.
<li>
   Mark also modified the mouse driver to double-buffer the pointer (so it 
   doesn't flicker any more), and added a set_mouse_sprite_focus() function.
<li>
   Added set_mouse_range() and set_mouse_speed() functions.
<li>
   Thanks (again) to Mark Wodrich, the grabber can now import GRX .FNT files.
<li>
   The grabber can now make backups when saving datafiles, and it only 
   writes the datafile headers if their contents have changed, to prevent 
   unnecessary recompilation.
<li>
   Added a text_height() function.
<li>
   The fixed point inverse sin and inverse cos functions now use lookup 
   tables, which makes them a lot faster.
<li>
   Reorganised the directory structure, added some example programs, and 
   improved the documentation.
</ul>


@heading
Changes from 2.0 beta to release (March 1996)
<ul><li>
   Marcel de Kogel fixed some problems with the MPU-401 driver. It now 
   actually works :-)
<li>
   Marcel also provided some better drum sounds for the Adlib driver.
<li>
   Inlined the fmul() and fdiv() functions.
<li>
   Much faster fsqrt(), taken from Arne Steinarson's fix-float library.
<li>
   Added inline bmp_write_line(), bmp_read_line(), and _putpixel() functions.
<li>
   The keyboard routines now support the emergency abort sequence 
   ctrl+alt+del, and there are signal handlers to make sure Allegro will 
   shut down cleanly if your program crashes.
<li>
   Wrote new irq wrappers that can deal with reentrant interrupts.
<li>
   Added joystick routines (based on code provided by Jonathan Tarbox and 
   Marcel de Kogel).
<li>
   Moved some functions to different files and juggled things about so the 
   linker can do a better job. If you don't use the sound stuff, or don't 
   use any graphics functions, now they won't be linked into your executable.
<li>
   Marcel de Kogel manged to locate my (embarrassingly stupid :-) mistake 
   which was preventing the VESA 2.0 linear framebuffer driver from working.
<li>
   Various other performance enhancements and bug fixes.
</ul>


@heading
Changes from 1.x to 2.0 beta (Jan/Feb 1996)
<ul><li>
   Dropped all the Borland code. A couple of months ago I ran out of disk 
   space, and it was with great satisfaction the I executed the command 
   'deltree /y c:\bc4'. It was a horrible compiler, and I'm glad it's dead.
<li>
   Added SVGA support. As a result it no longer makes sense for 
   allegro_init() to put the system into mode 13h, so you will be in text 
   mode until you call set_gfx_mode().
<li>
   Added sound code (background MIDI music and sample mixing).
<li>
   Added support for proportional fonts (of any size) as well as the old 8x8 
   fixed size ones.
<li>
   XOR drawing mode.
<li>
   There is no longer such a thing as a SPRITE structure. The sprite drawing 
   code now draws bitmaps onto other bitmaps, which is a much more flexible 
   way of doing things. The datafile reader will convert all your old 
   sprites to bitmaps as it loads them in, so the only practical difference 
   this is likely to make is that the sprite drawing routines can't draw 
   opaque sprites any more (but you can use a blit instead).
<li>
   show() and get_sprite() no longer exist: use blit() instead.
<li>
   Added flipped and rotated sprite draw routines.
<li>
   Added bitmap scaling.
<li>
   Added RLE sprites.
<li>
   drawsprite() has been renamed to draw_sprite().
<li>
   textmode() has been renamed to text_mode(), to avoid conflicts with 
   definitions in conio.h.
<li>
   All the file access functions have been renamed from the stdio syntax to 
   pack_fopen(), pack_getc(), etc, so they can now be mixed with stdio code.
<li>
   Added pack_fgets() and pack_fputs().
<li>
   The port_callback pointer no longer exists.
<li>
   Removed polyline() (who ever used it?), and added a polygon(), which 
   draws a filled convex polygon with an arbitrary number of vertices.
<li>
   Added do_line() and do_circle() functions, which call a user-supplied 
   function for each pixel that needs to be drawn.
<li>
   Added a default keyboard interface to the GUI routines, allowing the 
   selection of objects with the arrow keys and &ltenter&gt.
<li>
   Added several new GUI messages and flags. In particular there are now 
   messages for tracking mouse cursor movement, an idle message, a special 
   return value for the MSG_CHAR message which allows an object to override 
   the default keyboard handling, and a flag which hides the object.
<li>
   There are new GUI routines to centre a dialog on the screen and to alter 
   the colors used by the standard alert and file selector dialogs.
<li>
   The file selector now takes a third parameter specifying which file 
   extensions to display.
<li>
   The timer routines now have better than millisecond accuracy, and it is 
   possible to alter the speed of a user timer callback in realtime (by 
   reinstalling it with a different speed value).
<li>
   Removed the _RGB struct and paltorgb() functions. RGB's are now stored 
   directly in the hardware format, with each value in the range 0-63.
<li>
   Added functions to get and set single palette entries as well as entire 
   palettes.
<li>
   Added DPMI memory locking code.
<li>
   Wrote a C++ 'fix' class which overloads a lot of operators, providing an 
   easy way to use the fixed point routines.
<li>
   There are probably lots of other things that I have forgotten about.
</ul>
