

  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 controled 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 
loosing 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 convinient 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 usefull 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.
