Macintosh 320x240??

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/Macintosh 320x240??

cbmeeks(Posted 2006) [#1]
I am really loving bmx!

Anyway, I have a Mac and a PC. Just for grins, I loaded the demo on the Mac and ran a program I developed on the PC. It worked first time!

however, I prefer 320x240 res because of the retro-fell of it but the mac couldn't show that res. It used high-res with a small 320x240 window to the lower-left.

Does anyone know if the mac can go that low or should I write my stuff to use 640x480 (which worked on the mac)?

thanks

cbmeeks


JazzieB(Posted 2006) [#2]
Well, I don't know about desktop Mac's, but my iBook won't go any lower than 640x480. In fact, it only supports 640x480, 800x600 or 1024x768, but that probably has to do with the TFT screen it uses. Desktop Mac's will support more res's, but only higher ones, rather than lower ones.

There's a couple of options to you to get a 320x240 feel...

1. Double-up all your graphics so that 1 pixel is in fact a 2x2 pixel and use 640x480. Fair bit of work here.

2. Or simply use SetScale 2,2 throughout your game and adjust the drawing co-ords. Make sure that filtering is off though (not sure what the command is, but it's either a command or a flag when you load your graphics). If you do this right, you can have a scale constant and use this throughout for drawing your graphics and still compile the same souce on a PC and a Mac. The ?macos and ?win compiler directives will be of great help here too.

Hope that helps.


ImaginaryHuman(Posted 2006) [#3]
I tend to agree with JazzieB. I have not seen any Macs with 320x240. I think Mac's have tended to be trying to have pretty good graphics displays for a long time and I'd be surprised if you see that resolution on any of the models currently available for sale. I have an ibook also which has 640x480 as the lowest resolution, and it doesnt' have ANY full screen modes, windowed-mode only. I mean, the desktop can be 640x480 or 800x600, but OpenGL can't open in full-screen at the same time as having a desktop.

Another option you should consider for making your display have 2x2 pixels, is use 640x480 as the resolution, but then set up the viewport and frustrum (definition of space that can be seen) so that the camera is `closer` to the objects being drawn, which will automatically scale the entire display from 320x240 to 640x480 regardless of what you draw. If you were to go the SetScale route, you will find it more difficult and time consuming as you have to double all of your coordinates and dimensions, whereas with a proper `view` of the game world you can just say `draw at 319,239 (bottom right corner pixel) and it will draw a 2x2 pixel in the bottom right corner of the screen.


ImaginaryHuman(Posted 2006) [#4]
Here's some links:

http://www.eecs.tulane.edu/www/Terry/OpenGL/Transformations.html
http://www.opengl.org/resources/faq/technical/viewing.htm