Raine 0.50.0 - pre release 1

[Robert]

Raine 0.50.0 - pre release 1 !

 

Ok, don't jump too fast on this one, it's just a pre-release.

So a lot of things are still not finished, and it's more for testers who don't mind editing a config file than for lazy end users !

 

Anyway if you still want to try it, you can get the source here, and the windows binary here. All the required dlls inside (normally !).

 

Pre-release information

 

This version is a pre-release, it hasn't got all the features planned for the final version. It's for testers only, people who are not afraid to edit a config file by hand. If you have a problem with this, just use an older version.

 

Using

 

The new gui can be controlled with the keyboard, the mouse or any joystick pluged in the computer. Here are the controls so far :

 

* Move in the menus : joystick up/down, keys up, down, home, end, page up, page down. If you use the keyboard, you can also type the first letters of the option you want (example : P to Play, Q to Quit). When you have typed enough keys to identify a single option, the option is chosen without having to type the return key.

 

* Choose an option in a list : joystick left/right, keys left/right, mouse button 1. The options are cycling so that you can access all the options even with a mouse with 1 button !

 

* Back, cancel a dialog : joystick button 2, key ESC, mouse button 2 (right button).

 

* Execute a menu command : joystick button 1, key RETURN, mouse button 1.

 

I tried to make all this as intuitive as possible.

 

Ingame controls

 

The same as the previous versions, except that I prefered to avoid the numbered keys because if international keyboards problems, so the default key for coin1 becomes Z, and the default key for P1 Start becomes A. Sorry for now there is no gui dialog to change the inputs. You can change them directly in source/sdl/control.c if you are familliar with the SDL constants for the keyboard.

 

For the joystick, the default inputs have been mapped so that I can use directly a ps2 dual shock controller.

 

What's different !

 

Well I'll probably not list everything here, just the most important points. The video system is completely different. Now it tries to autodetect the hardware accelerated features of your video card and to use hardware yuv overlays if they are available. You can force it to use the old blit method using the gui if you want.

 

The advantage of yuv overlays is that it allows to scale the game picture to any resolution without losing cpu power at all. There is even an option to fix games aspect ratio when it's close to 4:3 but not exactly 4:3 (320x225 -> 320x240). Also, it allows to resize the window on the fly with the mouse, even during game play. This is very convenient for modern computers which don't appreciate low resolutions, now you can play any game without changing the video resolution ! Notice though that raine will always keep the aspect ratio when you resize the window, so you can get an unexpected size when resizing like that.

 

Also raine now uses a true type font for its gui, and it will choose a font size to use the maximum of the screen size available. You might find this a little disturbing at start, especially for the main menu which can become very big, but I find it quite useful in some situations. I plan later to choose the min and max font sizes allowed.

 

There are also changes to the way inputs are handled, but you can't really see them since you can't change them with the gui for now... Oh well, later, it shouldn't be too hard to add this kind of dialog...

 

This version has no way to choose the roms directories, so you must edit the config file for this. It's named rainex_sdl.cfg for linux, and raine32_sdl.cfg for windows, so that you can install it in the same directory as an old allegro version without overwriting the settings of the old one. By the way this new version has no allegro at all in it, no raine.dat, and these silly bugs related to threads in the linux version are finally all gone !

 

There is no emudx support for now, basically because emudx is heavily linked to the allegro packfile format, so I need to change it completely. The gui is not finished, I am currently thinking about extensions needed to make a good file selector, and things like that.

 

If you want to compile this version, you'll need SDL_ttf and SDL_image, SDL_gfx is already included in the raine source now.

Source / Download