FIRST

OK, finally a new DVE version is there.

I must confess that it took a long time finishing this thing (again).
There were so many (fiddle) things to do that I wasn't particulary
interested in, that I quite often thought about droping the project.
But as you see, I didn't.

The emulator has not changed all that much, but the environment has,
just look at the size of the program or even the size of the whole package.

With this release included are works of many other people. Most of
them agreed in my including their stuff with the emulator, but some could
not be reached. I included their programs/texts without their consent and
hope I have not done wrong.

There are numerous people I have to thank for their helping me, even if
they might not know (about) me.

The emulator is free and will stay free, as long as I have a vote in this.
The source is included as usual and daring people might look at it.
I'm still using Scitech's SVGALIB 6.0, even if it is by now superceeded
by their MGL library. DVE will probably compile with little modification
with that library, though I have not tried it. As SVGALIB was and MGL
sort of is so is the SEAL library - free to use for free projects, my thanks
to all these people for offering their products to us!

DVE now is only one BIG program, which includes everything (and more)
the two older program versions included. This is partly because it made
debugging so much easier, but mainly because I wanted to create a
development system (emulator based) for the vectrex.
One can do some pretty neat things with DVE now, but have a look for
yourself. If functionality is missing drop me an email and I will think
about it for a (maybe) future release.

As you unpacked DVE you probably noticed, that there are now quite a lot
of files and directories. Here is the overall layout:

VECTREX
  BIN
    <all vectrex binary images>
  OBJECT
    <object files from compiler output>
  PIC
    <overlay pcx files>
  SAVE
    <save files from vectrex images>
  SOURCE
    <source to DVE>
  TEXT
    <pure ASCII text files>
  VOL
    <*.vol files for each binary image>
  HELP.DAT
    <all help files, including pcx images, and subdirectories>
  TOOL.DAT
    <data files for the GUI>
  vectrex.exe      # the emulator
  tool.ini         # ini for the GUI
  vectrex.ini      # ini for DVE

The package is now complete in itself, it comes with most rom files,
with *.pcx overlay files, definition files for these...
There are some sourcecodes and for nearly all games there are instructions.
(excluding the newly created ones) (yes, INCLUDING the lightpen 'games'!)
As you look at the instructions for the games you will notice 3 different
kind of instructions, called 'HELP', 'TEXT', 'SCANNED'.
Most instructions were available as 'TEXT', I started of making 'HELP'
files from these, but after I did a few I was severly losing interest in
the conversion. (it IS boring AND timeconsuming)
The 'HELP' files look quite nice (help, done with the included help system),
but are a pain in the a... to make. Everyone is invited to do some so
we can have all games with a help...
After that I concluded that the 'TEXT' files were not so bad after all.
I made a little 'HELP' wrapper for them, and voila' online 'TEXT' help.
There is only one 'SCANNED' manual available. It was done to impress
people with the help system and to show that a scanned manual could be
made. Unfortunately 'SCANNED' help is by nature quite space consuming,
so even if I had made more of these, I would not include them in
internet distribution, since online space is sometimes rare...
(not to mention, that editing to make them look nice was even more
 time consuming than the 'HELP' helps)

The GUI is self made, as you might easily notice. It is a left of, of some
earlier programming I did. You will notice that the GUI package is not as
conform and organized as it could (should!) be. That is mainly because
it had different development stages and no real plan behind it. Today I
would approach things differently, but back than it was not today and that
is the reason I did things as I did.
Though it evolved into something like nearly a cooperative multitasking
GUI, it quite obviously isn't. Some things work nearly parallel, some others
not at all, you will notice that, when you fiddle around with the
filerequester and the mouse buttons. But I honestly couldn't be bothered
to reprogram everything from scratch.

Though everything is done in 'C', the programming style is rather
objectish, as you will notice once you dared looking closer at the source.
Today I'd probably do everything in 'C++', it would have made life
easier in a lot of situations. The Editor for example is sort of an
instance of a text-display class. As is the log window, the status window
or the monitor.

For development purposes I made a small editor. This is not really intended
to replace any other editor. Real development is probably a pain in the ass
with it, but for quick 'online' hacks I thought it sufficent.
There is online help available for many topics. In the editor and
the monitor, you can use the right mouse button to get some quick help on
certain topics. For example numbers (hex, bin, dec, ascii, 6809),
6809 opcodes and some vectrex OS functions.

The help system is a case of its own. It is really a mess, but apart from
that quite flexibel. The above mentioned quick help can be extended on the
fly without recompiling. The topics for quick help are found in *.key files
in the 'help.dat' directory. The usage is obvious.
Really tricky things can be done with the help, look at the '6809.txt' help.
I included TOC buttons in the included text from the 'TEXT' directory,
without changing the original text...
For some help concerning help files (*.hlf) look elsewhere.

