Subject: UADE2 will have a lot better portability?

From: timofonic
Date: Mon Jul 25 15:04:25 2005

To: Kohina-UADE-Forum
Hello,

I want to know if UADE2 will be improvened in portability stuff and if it will require more CPU power or less. The core it will act like a library? What about technical documentation for use it? What about license, LGPL or GPL?

What about a possible 2nd stage of the project in the medium-largue future? Reverse engineering for doing a non-emulated UADE, UADP or something like that ;)

Best regards,
timofonic

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From: shd
Date: Mon Jul 25 23:26:47 2005

To: Kohina-UADE-Forum
[quote:a12f741092="timofonic"]
I want to know if UADE2 will be improvened in portability stuff and if it will require more CPU power or less. The core it will act like a library? What about technical documentation for use it? What about license, LGPL or GPL?

[/quote:a12f741092]

Not more portable to new operating systems, but it will be easier to write a plugin for different players, such as XMMS. The two biggest motivation for UADE2 were that what I already said (easier to write new plugins) and correct some fundamentally bad design choices (laziness) in communication between the player and the emulator.

The core (the emulator) acts like a slave for the player. The core runs in its own process which has totally separate address space than the player. I've designed a synchronous communication protocol that is used from a player. There is no technical documentation at the moment. The protocol is not complex, though it would be nice to write one. There is example source code in the uade123 frontend. Also, there's a code module that handles the low-level stuff for the protocol so it need not be rewritten (src/uadecontrol.c).

The license of the core is GPL, but all the control modules and frontends are dual licensed under GPL _and_ Public Domain, so reusing our modules gives no license problems. However, I'm not sure if all player frontends should be considered derivative works of the GPL'ed core. This is an open question and it can hinder use of uade core in players that aren't GPL or LGPL.

Reverse engineering Amiga music players is not much fun and it's a wasted cause emulation works so well. Hence I won't be doing it. Obviously there are people who enjoy it, so go and ask them.