While porting my sound engine to other platforms I came across several platform limitations.
The easier one, turned out to be Win32 and Windows Mobile, of course. Good development tools, debugger, etc, and Symbian and Palm the harder ones.
What I’ve learned so far is that when coding multiplatform code, its really hard to keep the design as we want. We often need to hack stuff to defeat platform limitations.
With the limitations I knew about, I started refactoring and changing the design of the library. When I had all set, to avoid Symbian limitations, and started the Palm port, more problems!
The lack of documentation on some platforms doesn’t help either.
It’s really frustrating this kind of situation when we have scarce documentation, follow the rules, and it still fails. A lot of trial and error, where along the way we find small platform quirks which are not documented, or deeply buried in the documentation.
I’ve done a lot of refactoring, to account for the limitations I already knew about while at the same time keeping a reasonably clean design, but then I found more limitations on Palm.
It’s time for more refactoring to overcome more limitations!
I usually like to say…
“If it can be done, I can do it.â€?… But it may take a while! 
Archive for September, 2007
Multiplatform issues
Monday, September 17th, 2007czPlayer Sound System
Friday, September 7th, 2007Finally I resumed work in some of my own projects. I’ve been working on my Sound System (czPlayer), which I intend to license to BitRabbit.
About czPlayer Sound System:
Platforms supported:
- Win32
- Pocket PC
- Symbian
- Palm
Features:
- Sound.. of course. 
- MOD and IT support
- More to come.
czPlayer codebase started around 1998, when I created a music disk (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_disk ) with some friends. I’ve done all the code, and two friends of mine the gfx and sfx. We we’re still using MS-DOS at that time.
Everything was coded in Watcom C++ compiler which was the best DOS compiler at the time, and the PMODE/W dos extender.
I think we’ve done everything in our summer vacations, in 2-3 months
At that time, czPlayer was called Jupiter Sound System or something like that. It had nice features for a DOS sound library, supporting SB mono to SB 16, Gravis Ultrasound with both hardware and software mixing to overcome some limitations. See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravis_Ultrasound)
Maybe I’ll post here a video or the music disk itself later.
Anyway, most of the code was refactored by now, and doesn’t look like the old code.
It’s nice to be back to my projects.