Contents (newest first):
- Updated library file only
- First alpha available!
- The future is finally here!
- A bug fix
- What's Ingemar doing?
- Preliminary DeepBlitter add-on and demo.
- Preliminary SAT 2.6.0 libraries available.
- New demos: Apple Zoomer in Pascal and RoadTest in C.
- Bug warning.
- Work in progress: SAT for Intel.
- "Asking for help" section added.
- Update: SAT 2.5.1
- The SAT manual is available in pdf and eDoc formats
- New shadow site
- Special archive for Think Pascal 4.5d4
- SAT 2.5.0 is now available!
- New extra demos available!
- Old news.
Updated library file only (16-February-2004)
Too much other work has kept me from updating this page, but I must at least make this minimal update, an updated library that fixes the bug that prevents large sprites from working. Due to switching OSX computer, I don't have any working development system for the moment, so I can't properly test it while uploading. It was used for the OSX version of Solitaire House, so it seems to work nicely.
Again, library only. You need the other files to use it.
First alpha available! (12-April-2003)
Have I promised that SAT for OSX works, I better make it avalable. This is a "first alpha", many demos work just fine, while many others are not yet ported and a few have problems. This package only includes the SAT library and the SATminimal demo, but it should be enough for some testing and even to make a first attempt to port an old SAT-based game.
Remember that this is an alpha version! Any parts that I have not tested yet are likely to be buggy. Let me know if you find a bug, but don't be surprised even if it is a severe one. Fortunately, even if you do find a severe bug, it isn't likely to do anything worse than stopping your programs from running.
The future is finally here! (5-April-2003)
A long time between the updates, but now something is really happening! Today (april 5th 2003) SAT runs native under OSX for the first time! I did a serious porting atttempt last summer, but tried to fix too much at once and didn't finish. This time, I took a better approach. Now SAT for Carbon is as close to old SAT as possible. It costs some performance, but I can fix that later if there is a need for it. All the old blitter resources are obsolete, and I won't prioritize rewriting them. Most games will be fast enough anyway on a Mac that can run OSX.
So far, all that works is SATminimal, but that isn't at all as trivial as it may sound. The entire SAT core compiles and runs. Many bugs may be lurking, but all the Carbonizing is done!
I am currently working on a Carbon port of my Ludo game (Fia med knuff). With two or three full games Carbonized, SAT will be ready for an official update.
Now, I know that most of my past followers have moved on, but I know there are a few games waiting to be ported. If nothing else, at least my own. Solitaire House will most likely be Carbonized soon!
A bug fix
Today (june 27 2002) I fixed a bug in SAT that caused problems when playing looped sounds.
What about the Carbon version? I'm working on it! It isn't running yet, but I plan to fix it during the summer. I know that many SAT developers must have given up on me by now, but it is coming. Do you know what has kept me? Apart from other work: bugs made by Apple! If Apple had had less bugs and incompatibilities in their OSX installers, I could have spent much more time porting SAT!
What's Ingemar doing?
Common questions lately:
- What is Ingemar doing?
- Is SAT dead?
- Will SAT be ported to Carbon/MacOSX?
- Will you release the source for SAT as open source?
To start with the first question, I am teaching and raising my two small kids. The free time I have is more focused on music than games at this time, arranging concerts with local musicians.
So, have I abandoned SAT? Is it dead? No, I don't want to call it dead, not yet, and I havn't in any way dismissed the possibility to make a Carbon version. Until recently, I simply had no time to pursue this. I don't exactly have plenty of free time now either, but...
This very day (9th of june 2001) I got my first carbonized sprite animation running! No, I havn't carbonized SAT yet, but I have learned enough about carbonizing to adapt various small demos.
So there is hope! I can soon try carbinizing SAT for real.
On the Open Source side, just let me say that I'm still considering it, I just don't want to turn it loose in the current state. It works all right, but it needs some cleaning. It is time to get rid of some not too nice kludges, workarounds for bugs in Sound Manager 2, support for non-color Macs... Seriously, it is time for SAT to at least requires a color Mac with 256 colors! If anyone wants to support the old Macs, then use an older version. Sounds good to you?
Preliminary DeepBlitter add-on and demo
Everything is "preliminary" these days, it seems. Well, here's something I don't want to keep secret any longer: an add-on for making transparent sprites, using grayscale masks. You should find it a lot faster than using CopyMask with a grayscale mask (unless you have some hardware acceleration for that), but still a lot slower than the usual blitters. It is undocumented at this time! You have to figure it out from the demo. Sorry about that. Of course I plan to make documentation, but that would keep this locked up for much longer.
Download preliminary DeepBlitter add-on and demos.
Preliminary SAT 2.6.0 libraries available
After finding a flaw in the collision detection (which didn't affect most of you), I decided to put in another change that I find rather important, namely to allow -1 as task, when a sprite is active but has no task. This is what I call SAT 2.6.0. It isn't tested much yet, so consider this a beta version &endash; and please report any bugs you find.
New demos: Apple Zoomer in Pascal and RoadTest in C
Apple Zoomer is a screen saver application using SAT with its scaling add-on. It animates a "starfield" of Apple logos. Source included, of course.
RoadTest in C is a C version of the RoadTest that was uploaded previously (see below). It was translated by Ale Volz. The archive is just as he sent it.
Bug warning
I found a bug when finishing Apple Zoomer: the 68k compiler in CodeWarrior has serious bugs that prevents the scalin add-on from working on it. However, on PPC, and under the Think compilers, all is well. I will make a workaround for this bug (I don't expect Metrowerks will) for an upcoming update, but for now... PPC or Think, if you use scaling!
Another bug that was recently fixed is the built-in step-scrolling. It worked, but only if you did one very non-intuitive extra operation from outside. I'm planning a new demo that will use it, and use it right.
Work in progress: SAT for Intel.
You may call it heresy, but it is true: I have ported the essentials of SAT to Intel computers, using the Allegro library as underlying layer. I have already completed one game with it, called eFinans. (It will show up in the archives soon.) The game is cross-platform, both for Mac and PC.
The PC version of SAT is not likely to show up soon, and I can't promise it ever will. It works, but it is so far just a subset of SAT, and most add-ons are not ported. I can, however, take on porting jobs and cross-platform projects myself.
"Asking for help" section added.
See below. If you have problems, please read that first. I don't mind helping you out &endash; I definitely prefer it over you giving up &endash; but you can make my life much easier and get help faster if you think twice on a few points.
Update: SAT 2.5.1
SAT 2.5.1 is an update to SAT 2.5.0 that only affects PPC code. The update is simply the PPC library. It fixes a memory leak in the PICT drawing routines and in SATFakeAlert. (Sorry &endash; but now at least it is gone!)
Download SAT 2.5.1 PPC library.
2.5.0->2.5.1 updater (smaller download than the entire lib, thanks to Steve Rusher).
The SAT manual is available in pdf and eDoc formats
Thanks to Christopher Ross, the SAT manual is now available in pdf format, that is, Adobe Acrobat. It is provided for those of you who have no means of reading an MS Word 5 file &endash; and seriously, we can't support only a M$ format, can we?
Acrobat Reader 3 or newer required! Sorry, complain to Adobe.
Download SATmanual.pdf.
And a bit more recently, Steve Rusher of the The DropToTheFloor Team provided an eDoc version on his site. This is self-contained, small and fast &endash; highly recommended! Get it here.
New shadow site
The Drop To The Floor site, mentioned above, is also shadowing the SAT files, so if you fail to download from Lysator, you can try there.
Special archive for Think Pascal 4.5d4
For users of Think Pascal 4.5d4, I have prepared a special SAT 2.5.0 archive. TP 4.0.2 and 4.5d4 differ a bit, especially since 4.5d4 supports Universal Interfaces. As long as 4.5 isn't available in a more final version, I will not switch to it for the standard distribution, but since 4.5d4 is often used by beginners, I can't expect them to make the necessary changes before lerning the tools. Thus, this intermediary solution is called for.
SAT 2.5.0 is now available!
Yes, finally. Actually, it has been finished for quite some time, but right then, Lysator pulled the plug on some services &endash; most importantly ftp uploads &endash; so it isn't until now that I've been able to find a way through. The ftp archive is still dead, but at least I can upload to WWW.
So, here is the new version. I hope you like it, and that it will result in some new fun games!
Most significant features:
- New scrolling engine included, the TileScroll engine. This engine has much lower memory demand than the older scrolling solutions.
- The add-ons are revised. SATGridToolbox and SATStrictGridToolbox no longer depend on a "stubs" file. This makes them much easier to use, and they can now be included in the add-on library. New demo: StrictGrid demo.
- The C headers now have names for the parameters.
- Collision /// and SATCluts now comes in C versions. (Thanks to Peter Amberg.)
- Demos come with CW Pro 2 projects. I am not sure this is an advantage, since the CW Pro IDE is so slow. If you have a slow Mac, you may want to find an older SAT version just to get the project files.
- SATSound revised: Added routines to SATSound for looped sounds and stereo placement of sounds. SATSound now plays 44kHz sounds.
Download SAT 2.5.0 here:
Libraries and documentation. This is the most vital part.
Demos. Well, you should get them.
Demo binaries. You only need them if you have problems compiling the demos, or if you are not sure that they work correctly after compiling.
New extra demos available!
The following demos are too large, or not quite vital enough to make it into the SAT package, but can be of interest if you want even more demos.
- Kopter. This is a partially done helicopter game by B. Kobben.
- SAT RoadTest. This is a "fake scrolling" demo with top-view traffic.
- SATminimalScores demonstrates how to use the Scores add-on to manage and display scores and high scores.
- Text demo shows how to make sprites generated directly from code.
- Tint demo shows how you can use QuickDraw's color mapping when drawing sprites.
Old news.
In case you have an older version of SAT than 2.4.0, the following older news may be of interest:
SAT 2.4.0 is released! Although it is 99.9% backwards compatible, there is a substantial amount of changes, improvements and additions.
- Sorting is improved. You will find that SAT often sorts faster than before, and if that isn't enough, there is an add-on SortingUtils.p, which sorts insanely fast.
- The FastLoad add-on is debugged, and seems perfectly reliable now.
- The new 8-bit PPC blitter, released separately during the winter, is included.
- The preliminary 16-bit blitters are also included. You still shouldn't expect any major speedup with them, but the more I work with 16-bit graphics, the more will I work on them, optimizing them.
- The support for custom drawProcs is much better. I have a fair number of custom drawProcs for special effects, some available in special demos in my ftp archive. If you use custom drawProcs, and use the clip field, you need to update your routines.
- Bug fixes in SATGridToolbox, in the menu bar hiding code, pattern utilities and SATFakeAlert.
- Several minor enhancements in add-ons.
- MiscGraphics add-on added, with a pile of useful graphics-related routines, including screen wipes, new glue for patterns and cursors, operations on Rects, ZoomRects...
- Offscreen buffers now have correct width on all bounds. (Previously, you had to rely on the portRect or gSAT.offSizeH, while some other widths were incorrect.)
- The gSAT fields curMaskBlit and curRectBlit are valid again. They now hold the currently used blitters (changed only by SATDepthChangedTest), useful for calling from custom blitters who need to use them.
Very few SAT users will get any problems with the new changes, but still, there are plenty of changes, so let me know if you have problems related to this update.
Update 1 and 2 on 2.4.0
Update 1 and 2 are two small updates with bug fixes and mistypings in the headers. You can find them in the ftp archive. You should update if you ever use drawProcs, FastLoad or menu bar hiding!
I have a whole bunch of features and add-ons that aren't public yet. Once I have put them to serious use in my own games, they will go into the next SAT release. For example, I have a nice new scrolling engine, but I don't consider it safe until I have used it heavily enough.
Copyright ©1999 Ingemar Ragnemalm.
Updated: 16-February-2004