This may seem weird, but you should turn it
off. If your program only takes input from a parallel port or gameport response box,
Windows's won't detect that input, will consequently think that nobody is using the
computer and will switch to the screensaver after a while.
Some people think that network activity will
induce timing errors. I think that's an urban legend. Boosting your program's priority
should be enough to get satisfactory timing precision. On the other hand, turning off the
network anyway will do no harm.
That depends on the priority
settings of your firewall or virus scanner. Your Tscope program should have higher priority
than any other program running on your computer. The priority mode of each program can be
altered by opening the task manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) and right-clicking on that program's
entry. If the priority of your virus scanner or firewall is set to HIGH, you should close it,
or lower its priority to get accurate timing with your Tscope program.
Yes, but replace all the calls to
Allegro's timing or screen init functions with their Tscope counterparts.
Yes, the randomization subsystem does not activate any other Tscope
subsystem. You can use them in combination with any graphics rendering or timing functions you
like.
You can make your own font files with the True Type fonts that are installed on your system.
This is a two-step process: first the font has to be converted to a pcx file format, then the
pcx file has to be converted to an allegro specific file format.
The ttf2pcx program converts True Type fonts to pcx files. It can be found in
/usr/local/ttf2pcx.
If you start ttf2pcx, it will show a list of all the available True Type fonts on your
system. Select the font you want, and export it (monochrome, no antialiasing, and set max char
to 0xFF).
Once you have exported the font to a pcx file (e.g. myfont.pcx), copy it into
/usr/local/allegro/tools dir. Open the Cygwin shell, and cd into that
directory.
Run
./dat myfont.dat -a myfont.pcx -s2
and you will end up with a font file that can be read by Tscope. Copy it into your programs
working directory, or into /usr/local/fonts to use it with your programs.
From Allegro version 4.2.0 onwards (that is shipped with cygwin4tscope >= 1.0.3) the
keyboard layout is detected automatically.
