[scummvm-devel] Hello from Atari world!

[Miro Kropáček]

Hi everyone,

Sev was brave enough to offer me a permanent ScummVM developer status and
asked me to introduce myself.

Well, I'm from Slovakia, 40+ y.o. and since the 90s my biggest computer
love is the Atari brand. I started with an 8-bit Atari in 1993, had an ST
in 1997 and finally Atari Falcon in 2001. Since the 2000s I've been
enjoying programming in m68k assembler and C for the Falcon, you can find
some of my works on my website.

Professionally I work as a C++ developer for about 15+ years, currently at
Bohemia Interactive Simulations.

I'm sort of maintaining various Atari projects like SDL, FreeMiNT,
gcc+binutils, Atari800, ... and have done some ports just for fun,
including an early version ScummVM, Descent or OpenTTD. Those were never
officially released because I wasn't satisfied with the quality but you
know how it is, over the time you kind of let go.

Maybe you have noticed another Atari porter of ScummVM, OpenTTD or even
gcc, Keith Scroggins (KeithS), we have been passing the torch so to say
to each other, when I was busy/lazy, he did some work on his own and vice
versa.

Current situation of ScummVM for Atari is not so good: it is built against
an old SDL version, it doesn't even seems to work anymore and most
importantly: it's very resource-hungry because of the SDL backend (every
additional surface creation/conversion hurts performance on a <100 MHz
machine). Over the christmas holidays I was highly inspired by an AmigaOS3
port of ScummVM done by NovaCoder:
https://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=9673 and told myself to "give it
a week or two" to measure how quick it would be without any additional
layers. And happily, it seemed to be good enough not only to justify a more
serious work but maybe even to create a version for *really* low-end Atari
machines for some games (say, 32 MHz as the bare minimum). Especially after
I have discovered Vladimir Serbinenko's work on RGB332 format, I am amazed
how well that works despite the bit depth limitations (before that I was
about to go down the https://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?p=57964#p57964
road...).

So, fast forward two months and here I am, on the verge of accepted pull
request and signing my soul for future work / releases for the Atari Falcon
backend (called "atari" in source code).

Except the atari backend I might contribute to other areas of ScummVM, like:

   - engine optimisations (my big dream is to see somehow unified calls
   to copyRectToScreen() function - perhaps using the Screen class - it hurts
   my eyes to see that some engines basically do all their work "in house" and
   then in copyRectToScreen() I basically just copy the whole game buffer to
   my buffer and then copy that buffer to screen in updateScreen() ... but
   many engines don't do this so I have to keep copyRectToScreen() versatile
   with that one additional buffer)
   - audio optimisations (https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/14267 is a good
   candidate)
   - generic refactoring / bugfixes found during my development (as I
   usually work in quite a different environment / setup)

but for those I'd of course always open a PR to see how plausible my idea /
approach is.

I guess that covers the introduction, thanks for having me onboard!

Miro

-- 
http://mikro.atari.org
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