August 30, 2002
Whither Classic?
A question recently asked on a Director developers list I frequent (paraphrased): "how can I tell if my Mac projector is running in emulation on an OS X box?"
One reason this may be important to know is if your projector is using an xtra that is incompatible with or works differently when run in OS X's "Classic" mode emulation of OS 9.x. For instance, I found that the Scott X's very groovy GammaFade xObject used in my first CD-ROM project fails to control screen gamma tables when run in Classic.
Gretchen Macdowall, who runs UpdateStage, required reading for Director quirks and a point source for high-quality xtras, offers a solution using MasterApp, a xtra developed by Glenn Picher (also responsible for Shockwave.com's Creativity xtras).
She writes "One way to do it with MasterApp Xtra is to look for an app called "Classic Support" in the task list. It is only present when 9.* is running under Classic on OSX."
Anyone know of another way to tell, either with or w/o a xtra?
Posted by Lewis Francis at August 30, 2002 11:37 PMCame across Daniel Devolder's free VoidP xtra which can also be used to detect the Classic environment. Looks like a few other useful handlers, too, especially one that may help get around a problem with buggy print drivers that can cause Director to crash.
Posted by: Lewis Francis at October 17, 2002 10:47 PMNow that Director MX is out, you might want to turn this around a bit -- detect whether your OS X-native projector is running in an earlier MacOS.
One way of accomplishing this would be to use a stub movie to check the value of the environment.osVersion before initializing any platform-specific xtras. The OS X version of the NetLingo xtra is one such example that won't be happy and will crash the system when inadvertently started up on OS 9.
Posted by: Lewis Francis at May 15, 2003 10:28 PMListed below are links to weblogs that reference 'Whither Classic?' from Information Gift.
