Porting

General Tips & Techniques:

Port early and port often. Transfer files from platform to platform regularly and confirm they are behaving in the way you expect them to. Note that Windows 3 uses the 8.3 filename convention. Macs will let you have about 27 characters in a filename, and Win95/NT4 will let you have up to 255 characters. Be careful about how you name things.

When porting, stick with standard system fonts common to all computers -- Times, Courier, Helvetica -- unless you create your own with Fontographer or are using anti-aliased text fields.

Beware of overloading Windows 3 systems. Your Director file might tick over perfectly on Win95/NT4, but could GPF you right into the ground with Windows 3.

Keep all your file names 8.3 compliant, even if you don't think you're ever, ever going to port any of them. That way, if you do eventually have to port, you won't get into as much trouble as if you did everything platform-specific.

Keep your Lingo as generic as possible using machineType tests to assign such things as directory-delimiter characters and menu castmembers.

Look out for the Flashing White Rectangle of Death on Mac systems. Some Projector compiles (Director 4 and 5, anyway) require 32-bit memory addressing active on the target Mac machines. Some versions of the MacOS (about 7.1 to 7.5) allow the user to disable 32-bit addressing on non-PowerMac boxes. In fact on many of these systems 32-bit addressing is off by default. Problem is that this will cause a hard freeze of the user's Mac, generally with a wide, flashing white rectangle being displayed onscreen. Unfortunately there's no way internal to your Projector to prevent this; as soon as the file launches it's hosed the system. To get past this potential issue, include a huge and very-visible warning in your Mac distribution documentation alerting the user to this problem and telling him how to get past it.

To enable 32-bit addressing:
 

  • Open the Memory Control Panel
  • Click the ON button in the section labeled "32-bit addressing" or "Modern Memory Manager", whichever is present.
  • Close the Memory Control Panel

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    Reboot the Mac.

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