jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) (01/01/88)
Has anyone ever been able to get the development library distributed
with "LIVE!" to work? If so, how? I'm trying to use "LIVE!" with
Lattice C. A-Squared claims this should work, but under pressure they
admit they haven't tried it. A-Squared's own sample program doesn't
work with their library under Lattice C. Supposedly this will be
fixed in the next version of the library. But that's what they said
the last three times they sent me a new library.
So far, I have not been able to get past the call to LIVEinitialize.
Early attempts produced a system crash, because the assembly-code
interface to the library destroys register A6, which Lattice expects
to be preserved. So I'm now calling the library directly from C,
with the calling sequences generated by the compiler per the PRAGMA
directives generated by running the .FD file through the FD2PRAGMA
program. This works well enough that I can now call LIVEinitialize
without crashing the machine.
The next problem is the parameters to LIVEinitialize. The
.FD file, the assembly code interface, the sample program, and
the documentation do not agree on the number and type of parameters.
But the people at A-Squared tell me that the third parameter is
the device address, for use with pre-autoconfigure versions of the
system, and that this value should be zero. (The documentation says
that the third and fourth parameter are unused, and the sample program
passes the address of the graphics library and Intuition library in
them. But I digress.) With it nonzero, the call to LIVEinitialize returns
in error, and returns an error code in the Framegrabber structure
of 13, indicating incorrectly that the "LIVE!" hardware is not present.
With it zero, an error code of zero is returned; error code zero is not
documented. This is as far as I have been able to get to date.
A-Squared's people have been friendly and helpful. But their
response is usually "Oh yeah, that doesn't work, we'll send you a new
version in a few days." The new one shows up, usually in weeks rather
than days, and doesn't work either. This has been going on for three months.
My patience is exhausted. So I would like to find out if anyone, anywhere
ever got A-squared's library to work. Alternatively, has anyone developed
software which bypasses A-Squared's library and talks to the hardware directly?
Comments about competing products would also be welcome.
John Nagle
415-326-9109