3 ms·

> It can't be that difficult. I remember a Commodore developer(?) once saying "Intuition is the only one word oxymoron he knows". The context isn't clear but

> It can't be that difficult. I remember a Commodore developer(?) once saying "Intuition is the only one word oxymoron he knows". The context isn't clear but perhaps it was difficult to implement.

vidarh 11y ago
The draggable screen part is not particularly hard. It's basically multiple workspaces coupled with data about screen mode and offset from the top of the screen. Whenever they're dragged, intuition need to rebuild a copper list - basically a set of instructions for a simple co-processor. The copper list will contain a bunch of simple instructions to wait for a certain scan-line, and then write new values into various registers to change screen mode (if necessary), update the palette, and change the source of bitmap data to the location of the next screen.
- chillingeffect 11y ago
  Yeah on the c64, the vic2 video chip could gen an interrupt at a configurable vertical line. So many people used different graphics modes for each band of the screen, Amiga went further and facilitated it. It was fun mixing interlaced (and therefore shaky on a bad monitor) modes with stable modes.
anexprogrammer 11y ago
Wow, don't agree with that. I always thought Intuition the nicest GUI I ever programmed. It was beautifully designed. ADos was a mess obviosuly. And rather limited compared to what we're used to now. I remember at the end of the Amiga days buying a PC, Petzold, Visual Studio and MASM. Worked through Peztold, by the end and after porting one of my simpler amiga apps, there was so much swearing and disbelief at how Windows did dozens of things, and my app was now 40x larger with all the shite you needed, just to accept a resize message or somesuch that I sold VC, MASM and the book to some random guy at work and never touched Windows programming wise ever again. Pc had been reinstalled with FreeBSD within weeks too. That was the moment I became a server side developer. :) Played with X a little, but wasn't a huge fan of that either, but it didn't produce the same level of swearing Windows had. Never did any real dev on OSX with the GUI, so don't know.

> It can't be that difficult. I remember a Commodore developer(?) once saying "Intuition is the only one word oxymoron he knows". The context isn't clear but perhaps it was difficult to implement.

vidarh 11y ago

The draggable screen part is not particularly hard. It's basically multiple workspaces coupled with data about screen mode and offset from the top of the screen. Whenever they're dragged, intuition need to rebuild a copper list - basically a set of instructions for a simple co-processor. The copper list will contain a bunch of simple instructions to wait for a certain scan-line, and then write new values into various registers to change screen mode (if necessary), update the palette, and change the source of bitmap data to the location of the next screen.

chillingeffect 11y ago
Yeah on the c64, the vic2 video chip could gen an interrupt at a configurable vertical line. So many people used different graphics modes for each band of the screen, Amiga went further and facilitated it. It was fun mixing interlaced (and therefore shaky on a bad monitor) modes with stable modes.

anexprogrammer 11y ago

Wow, don't agree with that. I always thought Intuition the nicest GUI I ever programmed. It was beautifully designed. ADos was a mess obviosuly. And rather limited compared to what we're used to now. I remember at the end of the Amiga days buying a PC, Petzold, Visual Studio and MASM. Worked through Peztold, by the end and after porting one of my simpler amiga apps, there was so much swearing and disbelief at how Windows did dozens of things, and my app was now 40x larger with all the shite you needed, just to accept a resize message or somesuch that I sold VC, MASM and the book to some random guy at work and never touched Windows programming wise ever again. Pc had been reinstalled with FreeBSD within weeks too. That was the moment I became a server side developer. :) Played with X a little, but wasn't a huge fan of that either, but it didn't produce the same level of swearing Windows had. Never did any real dev on OSX with the GUI, so don't know.