Birdie mini FAQ. What is Birdie? --------------- Birdie is a hack that gives you datatypes loaded patterns in the window border of windows open on the default public screen (WB). Current version is V1.4. Where can I get it? ------------------- www.vgr.com/birdie How does it work? ----------------- It redirects border rendering calls to own fast pattern fill routines. If the screen is hicolor, also shine and shadow pens (white and black) will be replaced with a shine and shadow versions of the pattern. This light effect is currently precalc'ed, so each pattern is stored in 3 versions, eating up memory if big patterns are used. In 8bit only the normal fill color is changed. In 1.2 you can control how it works somewhat more. Is birdie safe to use? Will it crash? ------------------------------------- Maybe. You just have to try it. There ARE problems, but many people including myself don't have any of them. This makes it difficult for me to debug it, but I'm doing my best to try to figure out what is wrong. It doesn't work here, is there anything I can do? ------------------------------------------------ Maybe. First try disabling ALL hacks and patches. Try to break your startup right after IPrefs is loaded. Then start birdie, and see if it works. If it does, you could try to nail down what other thing is causing Birdie to crash by reenabling other hacks. If you discover something neat, please mail me. (see address below) Are there any known problems with other hacks? ---------------------------------------------- I haven't actually verified all of this, but people have mentioned the following: - disable PatchControl. At least for testing Birdie once. - check if you're using a weird adddatetypes replacement. (I doubt this means anything, but you never know). - disable Arq if you use it and try. - try running StackAttack and give all tasks some more stack. again, if you somehow can verify anything, please mail me. Birdie disables the NoBorder hack in NewIcons. What's up? --------------------------------------------------------- Patch conflict, caused by NI being more dirty than it needs to. I'm gonna do my own NoBorder patch within Birdie, so that people don't have to run patch on patch on patch... It will be faster too, I hope :) NOTE: in 1.2 birdie has a new NOICONBORDER option which you should use instead of the NI options. Does Birdie make my system slower? ---------------------------------- Yes. But only by a tiny amount. You will probably never see it yourself, but if you run WSpeed or similiar progs, you can discover a tiny slowdown, at least in the Draw Hor/Vert test I think. DON'T be scared by this. In fact, for Gfxcard owners, Birdie can actually make your border draw faster!!! How that is possible? You see, the system gadgets are normally in planar mode, and even when running sysihack they are planar. Technically, this is due to that when BOOPSI images are created, they get a DrawInfo structure to peek at for rendering info. But this structure was designed for planar AOS displays and does not contain a bitmap pointer or any other source of info so that the BOOPSI class can tell what custom CGX pixelformat the screen is. Therefore, such images ends up being planar. This means that everytime intuition redraws a border, all the system gadgets must be converted from, say, 8bit planar to 16bit hicolor, which is VERY SLOW. With birdie, a pattern filled copy of the image is quickly drawn because it is in hicolor already! Any last words? --------------- Well, Birdie was developed with the aid of chocolate. Author is Trond Werner Hansen, tronhan@stud.ntnu.no It was made just for fun and for all cgx users to enjoy.