Pulsar Guided Tour

[zikmu] + [monitor] = [rocket] !

R'alf, July 27, 1997.
This brief guided tour helps you start with Pulsar v0.6.
It's mainly a good base for demoing the app at Boston.

Launch the app

First of all, double click the Pulsar icon. You will get a screen looking like this :

This screen has a resolution of 640x480.
You can note that the application interface has been designed to fit in that resolution. The interface window automatically expand to the size of the workspace minus some pixels. This way you can always grab the window by its corners and move it around, zoom it, resize it, etc.

Show Info

Then press the Info button on the upper left corner of the interface window. You will see a window like this :

If you're showing the app in the middle of a BeOS presentation, you may comment marketroid things like : "this application is BeOS specific, see the logo ; it's definitively BeOS compliant, takes the most of the OS, uses multithreading, supports the game kit and the media kit. It features a direct Audio CD interface via Posix calls, etc." Your mileage may vary.

Set refresh rate

Now comes the real usefull thing.
We're going to step throught a typical usage of the application. Thus you can comment what you do while you do it.
Close the About and the Info windows.

First of all, let's switch the application frame rate. By default it's setup at 42 Hz. I mean the game kit blit occurs at no more than 42 frames per seconds. I may be slower but not faster. Why defaulting to 42 fps ? Well it's a reasonable refresh rate, but let's be nut and rock this : switch it to 220 Hz. You know you will never reach this :-) !
The popup is located in the bottom on the interface, just above the fullscreen button.


Show Bitdepth

Just have a look at the Colors popup, located just at the right of the refresh rate popup. It's currently fixed at 8 bpp, but actually the application can issue 32 bpp. It's coded by just disabled since it's not safe. The final version will probably promote 16 bpp support instead of 32. In fact, 32 is good, it gives you millions of colors but noone cares. 16 bpp is fine, since it's faster and gives you a really neat graphic look.
Of course, the bit depth only affect the Preview and Fullscreen final render.

The interface itself is designed to adapt automagically to the workspace you're running, so if you move the interface from a 8-bpp to a 32-bpp workspace, it will immediatly have a neat look.

On the other hand, if you use the preview mode, it's always fixed in 8 bpp for this release and thus it runs faster on a 8 bpp workspace.

This is why you're asked to do you demo in a 8 bpp workspace if one is available.

Interface tips

Start moving the mouse around on the buttons. You notice that every button as a strong responsiveness (ahum, where's my dictionnary !!!) to the mouse. The Start button for example is grayed, it doesn't react. The Preview button highlights when you pass the mouse over. You can also press the mouse button on it but do not release it to show that the button also highlights in a different way to let you know your going to act (move the mouse out of the button before releasing it, we don't want to enter preview mode now).

Issue a New

Repeat the operation with the button on the top of the interface. This time press it. This will get rid of the random stuff in the Track View.

Drag'n'drop a filter

Explain that pulsar works with music. Point at the CD interface for this.
What does it do with music ? It applies filters : some external code (an add-on) that renders something to the screen depending on the music. You can see several filters on the left side.
In the middle of the window is the Track View. This is your project track.

Take a filter, the "FFT filter" one for example and drop it on the track, on the left side, on the upper line (it must switch to orange color) :

This way you asigned the layer 1 to this filter.

Adjust filter keys

Let's point at the newly affected track line :

The line represents the time and the blue color rectangles in it represents when the filter is active and when it's not. Currently a line has only one editing mode : the repeat mode.

Understanding it is quite straightforward and it's a good demo of the Be GUI responsiveness, IMHO.

The repeat mode uses a model, the leftmost blue rectangle, and repeats it on the time.
Do this in that order :

The rightmost tab defines the length of a pattern, i.e. the repeat interval. Move it from left to right and observe the other blue rectangles moving accordingly.
The middle blue tab defines the stop time in the repeat interval. Move it from left to right.
The leftmost blue tab defines the start of the track in time. There will be no output before this time for this track. Move it from left to right.
Adjust every tab as you feel it. :-)

Repeat the operation and put as many filters as you want. Take care of the order of the filters, it's important. Filters at the top render first, filters at the bottom render last (and thus can erase the first filter's output). Typically, you should always have these rules :

Note : each filter declares its preferred position when programmed (first, last, middle), but this is not currently used and doesn't appear in the interface.

CD access

You have direct acces to the Audio CD Interface :

The CD device menu lists every CD-capable device in your machine. If there is no CD or if it's not detected, it will default to SCSI ID 3, which is the more common default. If Pulsar fails to find your CD device, this is maybe due to the fact that the CD tray is empty. I've discovered this on some beboxes (not mine :-)).
In order to avoid this problem, fill it with an audio CD before you start, preferrably some good teckno (your mileage may vary, it just looks best with strong bass stuff).

No need to explicitly start the CD, it will play automagically whenever you press Preview or Fullscreen.

Run it now !

To run you filter selection on the music, just press the [Preview] button or the [Preview] button

Whenever you press these buttons, the CD starts playing from track 1 if it was stopped.

If you run the preview, the preview window will appear. This window shows you the 8 bpp result from the filters. When this window runs, you can unzoom it or zoom it with the small two buttons in the left-bottom corner. The leftmost button makes the window smaller and the right button makes the window bigger. What happens is that the window resolution is still 640x480 but the output is (un)zoomed. You can't make the window bigger than 640x480.

When you press the Fullscreen button, the game kit starts. On every computer we tried except the PowerMac 4400 and the UMAX S900 with an IMS TwinTurbo 128, this works fine. In fact if you can run the Dominoes sample, you can use the FullScreen. If the fullscreen fails, it will elegantly return back to the interface with a dialog saying "Exception catched at xxx...". Don't bug me with this dialog box, I know it. But if this simply hangs your machine, I will be glad to know it.

Filter Info

You now know almost everything about the interface.

If you look at the filter list on the left, an item look like this :

And if you move the mouse on it, it looks like :

That's responsiveness !
When the mouse is over a filter, you can click and drag the filter to the track view.
But if you double click, you will open the Filter Info dialog box :

Notice that this dialog is not modal. You can still use the interface on the background while the window is on top. You can double click another filter without closing the Filter Info window first.

The Filter Info displays information about the filter. The gray zone is a future spaceholder for the filter parameters.

Enjoy !

Congratulations !
You known know how to use Pulsar.
Many things are still to be done, but the main concept is there.

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Last update : 20/11/98