Interesting Idea: Emulation running in Active Desktop...

[UNIXcoffee928]

Hi!

 

Anyone familiar with programming for Active Desktop?

 

It struck me that it would be cool to have an Atari emulator running there, for use anytime, if desired.

 

I made a mockup, to play around with some of Sun's Looking Glass kind of GUI metaphors, in a depth of field experiment. Seems that it would be cool to have something like this as a working environment.

 

I've included two of the wallpaper mockups that I made, for your own use, and a screen dump of its use as a Desktop. This is just a non-functional mockup for testing, but shows what I'm describing, and looks cool.

 

 

To use the examples as wallpaper, just set your background color in 'Display' to a color as close as possible to the bottom color of blue, and you're good to go. You may need to set it to stretch mode, I run at a pretty hi-res.

 

 

L8R,

 

UC928

[UNIXcoffee928]

Hi!

 

I had posted on this topic a while back, and while a bunch of people looked at it, nobody replied.

 

I was pretty much done with the idea, and happy to just use the DOS mock-up for desktop wallpaper, until last night...

 

Someone had recently posted asking if "Anyone uses BASIC anymore?". I had replied, mentioning some good modern alternatives, and amongst them, TCL/TK was one of the languages that I suggested.

 

Some time went by, then it occurred to me that if I could run TCL in Active Desktop, I could have something a little more useful for a desktop, than just the mock-up.

 

So, I just looked up how to do Active Desktop customizations, and after a bit of playing around with it, I was able to get a TCL interpreter running, with an ATARI BASIC motif, in the 'screen area' of my 3D wallpaper.

 

Now, this is just a little hack, built from a TCL/TK web app (Tclet) found here:

http://www.demailly.com/tcl/plugin/eval.html

 

Using the widely available "Atari Classic Smooth" typeface at 13 points, and a UNICODE "\u00c7" from that font as a prompt. (BTW, the cursor prompt works a little incorrectly by ATARI standards, but I'm not messing with it right now...)

 

So don't get your hopes up too much, it's just a fast & neat hack. As of now, it just looks like ATARI BASIC, it's still a TCL interpreter.

 

BUT, it is a functional interpreter ON THE DESKTOP, ready to be used at any time that you might want to solve a problem quickly, just like good old ATARI BASIC...

 

= )

 

 

Which makes it pretty neat. I don't think that anyone else has done this, so it does have a certain "cool-factor" to it.

 

You will need to have ActiveState TCL/TK installed on your PC, and you will need to install the web plugin found here:

http://www.tcl.tk/software/plugin/

 

 

Since this code is web-aware, you can run it off of any website, if you want to. Alternately, you can run it standalone. on any platform, by just clicking on the .tcl file.

 

Other than that, just make sure that you have the font, the DOS wallpaper above, and be sure that you make or modify the paths in the two source files.

 

You will need to rename eval-console-tcl.txt to eval-console.tcl to use it, since this forum won't allow you to upload .tcl files directly.

 

From there, just right-click on your desktop, and set the local html file as your Active Desktop customization.

 

Again, I want to stress that this is just a fun little hack. I may fiddle with it more in the future. If I do, I'll keep you updated. Feel free to modify it & mess around with it, & do keep us in on it.

 

 

L8R,

 

UNIXcoffee928

eval_console.html

eval_console_tcl.txt