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Dragon King Video Card Poll and Bug Report Thread
screaming:
Aaahh, just how I thought you'd reply! At least you're predictable.
It's your software, man. When I develop software, I want to make it the best it can be even if that means I have to compensate for other people's ignorance. I seem to take pride in catching the dumb things some people can do and handle those things gracefully.
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on March 06, 2004, 07:50:08 pm --- For example, why would anyone remove portions of the config file? Dk won't operate properly wihtout them anyway so what's the point of removing them. And for that matter, what's the point of supressing the error when dk would have to shut down anyway?
--- End quote ---
When DK crashes and leaves me without my windows taskbar, that's a bug.
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on March 06, 2004, 07:50:08 pm ---Gif's are intentionly not supported... it's says so in both the faq and the docs.
--- End quote ---
You're right. I was looking at the Extra Features for Lazarus. It's not anywhere in the DK docs, but it is in the FAQ.
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on March 06, 2004, 07:50:08 pm ---You aren't thinking smartly about some of the other things you suggested. For example you do have a "splash screen", it's the intro.mpeg.
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It's 10x harder to make a video of a picture instead of just a picture. I thought about making a video to show how my interface works, but I didn't think it was so hard of a thing to implement a splash or an emulator info screen.
What other things was I not thinking 'smartly' about?
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on March 06, 2004, 07:50:08 pm ---The zorder for the list is fixed on purpose.... it's possible to alter it, but it'd be silly as the list always needs to be on top. You can make the overlay go on top of it though.
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In my theme I would like the emulator logo to be on top of the list in the upper right-hand corner partially covering the last few letters of the top couple of lines in my list. So, does that mean you'll have overlays changeable by emulator?
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on March 06, 2004, 07:50:08 pm ---You've gotta understand something.... dk is user friendly, but it doesn't handle fatal errors. The reason for this is so the user understands something is wrong and re-checks their settings, rather than bugging me about a broken feature that would actually work if they set it properly. All non-fatal errors and handled and fixed accordingly.
--- End quote ---
So when DK or the DK skinner crashes losing all my work, I'll know that it's all my fault and not worry about 'bugging' you. Gotcha.
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on March 06, 2004, 07:50:08 pm ---With that being said, I do appreciate your feedback. This just isn't a commerical program. I do it for free, so don't expect commercial "spit and polish".
--- End quote ---
As a developer of open source software, I certainly realize the demand some users can have on a developer, even if that developer is working for free. Please don't consider my bug submittals and feature requests being a demand for anything, but rather helpful suggestions to help you make DK a front end that everyone will want to use.
I certainly don't expect 'spit and polish' from you. Thanks for the great front end, and I look forward to using DK for a long time. BTW, are there any plans in the works for either open sourcing DK or otherwise making the source available?
/Steve
Howard_Casto:
--- Quote from: screaming on March 06, 2004, 09:11:52 pm ---Aaahh, just how I thought you'd reply! At least you're predictable.
It's your software, man. When I develop software, I want to make it the best it can be even if that means I have to compensate for other people's ignorance. I seem to take pride in catching the dumb things some people can do and handle those things gracefully.
--- End quote ---
If that's how you thought I'd reply then why did you post all of that crap? It's very impolite to purposefully "egg somone on". When a program crashes because a user trys to make it do something it's not supposed to do then it's user error, not a bug.... simple as that. Now if it crashes for no reason that's a different story.
Don't misunderstand me I'm always welcome to suggestions on things I could do better, but this is the bug report thread, not the suggestion thread. You have like two pages of info and it's all lumped together.
Btw the skinner and dk are two different animals. The skinner is buggy and probably does crash a lot,.... dk, however is uncrashable assuming you haven't deleted lines from the cfg files like you said.
If you want me to seriously go over your issues then your going to have to filter everything off and make a suggestions post, a bug report post and a questions post.
Please don't do it in this particular thread though as we've alreayd cluttered it up.
Khenemet Heru:
Hey Howard, just wanted to give you some feedback on my issue with DK on my box.
This was a pretty non-standard setup, but I was trying things out on my Mini-ITX Via Nehemiah board before I started building. DK would load, start running, the intro movie would play, and then I'd get black screen and a dead 'puter - had to wait forever for it to force-quit to winXP.
The video card on that board is a built-in S3 with shared RAM, 64MB set in BIOS, which I found makes MAME suck wind anyhow... but no settings I tried would get me anything but that intro movie then black screen. I've since moved on to other things, but I thought I'd give you the report anyhow. I can get more info on the video chipset if you want it.
Howard_Casto:
No need.... s3 is an old, dead card.... it'll never be supported.
nipsmg:
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on March 07, 2004, 02:21:22 am ---
--- Quote from: screaming on March 06, 2004, 09:11:52 pm ---Aaahh, just how I thought you'd reply! At least you're predictable.
It's your software, man. When I develop software, I want to make it the best it can be even if that means I have to compensate for other people's ignorance. I seem to take pride in catching the dumb things some people can do and handle those things gracefully.
--- End quote ---
If that's how you thought I'd reply then why did you post all of that crap? It's very impolite to purposefully "egg somone on". When a program crashes because a user trys to make it do something it's not supposed to do then it's user error, not a bug.... simple as that. Now if it crashes for no reason that's a different story.
Don't misunderstand me I'm always welcome to suggestions on things I could do better, but this is the bug report thread, not the suggestion thread. You have like two pages of info and it's all lumped together.
Btw the skinner and dk are two different animals. The skinner is buggy and probably does crash a lot,.... dk, however is uncrashable assuming you haven't deleted lines from the cfg files like you said.
If you want me to seriously go over your issues then your going to have to filter everything off and make a suggestions post, a bug report post and a questions post.
Please don't do it in this particular thread though as we've alreayd cluttered it up.
--- End quote ---
Errors should be trapped in any program gracefully enough so that if it throws an error and has to shut down, it will show the task-bar, etc.
A crash from an "index out of range" that fully crashes a program is purely and completely a lack of error trapping.. If it's an API error, they're trappable also.
Users are ALWAYS doing what they're not supposed to do. This usually results in SOME kind of array out of bound error. Either they're overfilling/draining a stack, or changing things in a way so that data isn't where it's expected. If there's one thing I've learned, it's NEVER to expect that a registry key/text file/INI key/Array element will actually be where you expect it, and to always error-trap to capture those few cases where it's NOT actually there. (I write code in a business environment, and we write a lot of our software in-house. I'm writing, for the most part, for computer illiterate people.. or those who THINK they know what they're doing, and screw more stuff up. Those are the most dangerous, actually.)
This is meant as constructive criticism, not an insult to your programming ability at all, because I love your FE.
--NipsMG