Google Summer of Code ideas

[Roderick Colenbrander]

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 6:49 PM, Charles Davis <cdavis at mymail.mines.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I intend to participate in the Google Summer of Code this year, and I
> have several ideas for Wine that I'd like to bounce off you guys to see
> what you think. Note that all my proposals are Mac OS-based (I run Mac
> OS X), so many of you will never see the results of what I'm working on.
>
> Here they are:
>
> 1. Quartz Driver. This is something a lot of Wine-on-Mac users (myself
> included) have been wanting for while now. Of course, the entire driver
> itself is a big project, so I would limit the scope to implementing a
> small piece of it--say, windowing (which shouldn't be too hard thanks to
> my new "Deobjectivizer" tool)--and then finishing what I started after
> SoC ends.

Previous attempts at a Quartz driver roughly the tried to create a new
driver in a design similar to winex11. If we start a new driver, the
current driver design and winex11 need to be cleaned up. This requires
a dib engine :( Further I expect that various pieces of code need to
be moved from winex11 to wineserver/user32.
I have commented on how a next generation Wine driver should operate
(e.g. use software for all of GDI like windows is doing and like Win7
only accelerate some common operations like bitblt srccopy, colorfill
and a few others on the GPU).

All in all, I'm quite skeptical about projects in this area sincie it
is really, really, really hard.

> 2. QuickTime backend for DirectShow. This is is similar to the GStreamer
> backend, but it won't require people to install GStreamer on Mac just to
> get this support. To get 64-bit support, we have to use the Cocoa
> version of QuickTime, but again, thanks to Deobjectivizer, we can avoid
> writing it in Objective-C.

I'd rather see the current gstreamer code finished and integrated
before we perhaps add an additional backend. There are so many issues
which still need to be sorted out (I believe our audio/video rendering
code needs improvements and so on).

> 3. Implementing SCSI support on Mac OS X. I had patches to do this, but
> I deleted them because I thought they were inadequate. I want to do this
> to get copy protection working for some games on Mac OS X.

This might be useful. Not sure how trivial it is. Like Transgaming did
in the past, this might require a custom osx scsi driver but note I'm
not a osx user, so no idea if thiat's needed.

This were my comments, likely others will join in :)

Roderick