Hugi Interface - User's Guide

Chris Dragan

Basic Requirements

- Video card with hardware blitter (also called 2D accelerator),

- Pentium-compatible processor,

- 32MB of RAM,

- DirectX.

The most important thing is the hardware blitter. Without it (or proper support from the drivers) the display will be redrawn very slowly. I haven't used (yet?) display flipping techniques, as these require additional video memory and the result isn't much better.

Kickstart

You should read this before you start.

The Interface was designed to work no matter what is wrong with it or with the user's computer. If the Interface enters a fullscreen mode and hangs (happens e.g. on S3 Trio), first try the /hicolor switch to limit it to high-color mode, and if this won't help, you can still run it in windowed mode using /windowed switch. In critical situations you can try /noeffects and /novsync switches (also if your PC is slow).

If the attached modules/songs consume too much processor time (complex modules can work slow even on PII), try to limit the music quality with /22 /8 /mono and /11 switches (these correspond to 22kHz, 8bit, mono output and 11kHz). You can also disable music or overall sound with /nomusic and /nosound switches, respectively.

Please report any bugs to cdragan@ams.ampr.org. Comments (positive or negative) are also welcome.

Starting the Interface

Typically the Interface chooses the highest possible mode depth (i.e. number of Bits Per Pixel), unless the editor specifies otherwise (it is in his might to specify "hard-coded" depth). The depth may be 8bpp (palettized), 16bpp (including RGB555), 24bpp or 32bpp.

If the Interface runs slowly (weak processor) or if there are problems with a true color mode (24 or 32bpp), the user may choose to limit the depth to maximum 16bpp using /hicolor switch.

In some cases the Interface may not want to run at all in fullscreen mode, and the user may choose to run it in a windowed mode, using /windowed or /gui switch.

There are some special effects in the Interface, such as smooth scrolling or cross-fading. If these effects are too slow or cause crashes, the user may disable them using /noeffects switch.

The user may want to disable sound from some reason (bugs in player, listens to CD audio, etc.) /nosound switch disables all sound, /nomusic only music and /nosfx only sound effects.

If the user has a very slow hardware, or the tunes used with the Interface have lots of channels, the user might want to decrease the quality of music, gaining some free processor cycles. This can be accomplished with the following switches:

/8 - sets music output to 8-bit (by default 16-bit is used),

/mono - sets music output to mono (by default stereo is used),

/22 - sets output frequency to 22050Hz (by default 44100 is used),

/11 - sets output frequency to 11025Hz.

The /8 switch has effect only if the Interface uses BASS module player. The /mono switch does not affect FMOD module player. (Note that the Interface can use three music systems: an internal one that plays only XMs (not all!), external BASS or external FMOD.)

The Interface was designed to take advantage of mouse wheels. This cute invention enhances scrolling capabilities, but unfortunately has three different standards. If the mouse program sends WM_VSCROLL messages, the user may wish to create a vertical scrollbar to handle these messages. This can be accomplished with /weirdwheel switch. The other two handling techniques are done automatically. (The /weirdwheel switch is only needed on WinNT 3.x and Win95.)

The Interface can play external tunes. For this purpose there is /music switch, after which the path and name of a module must be specified. One can also use /xm switch, which uses the internal player, capable of playing only XM tunes.

As there is no page flipping used, the Interface waits for vertical retrace before drawing anything. To skip this wait and gather some milliseconds, the user may specify /novsync switch. Doing this, however, can decrease quality in some cases (if there is no hardware blitter, synchronizing with vertical retrace does not matter anyway).

In case you do not know, Windows applications can have switches entered at commandline, just like in DOS or Linux. Accessing command line is accomplished through Run command from the Start menu or in Shortcut properties (right-click on a shortcut, then enter the switches after the program name).

Navigating

It is easy to navigate through articles both with mouse and keyboard. As there are two types of articles, ones with contiguous contents, and ones with fixed-height pages that can contain columns, the techniques of scrolling them differ a bit.

To scroll a typical contiguous article, the user may:

- use up/down arrows, which select links and scroll articles vertically by a fixed small amount (typically a line),

- use page up/page down keys to scroll articles by a page,

- press space key to precisely scroll articles down,

- roll the mouse wheel which scrolls articles in a way depending on the wheel settings,

- move mouse cursor to the upper or lower edge of the screen, to scroll articles by a line,

- drag the progressbar (scrollbar) thumb to quickly position articles,

- click on the progressbar beyond the thumb to cause scrolling by a page,

- press home or end key to scroll an article to the beginning or to the end.

To scroll an article with fixed positions (e.g. with columns), the user may:

- use up/down arrows, which select links and scroll articles vertically by a page,

- use page up/page down keys to scroll articles by a page,

- use left/right arrows, which scroll articles left or right by a column (only if there are at least two columns),

- roll the mouse wheel to scroll articles up or down by a page per threshold,

- move mouse cursor to the upper or lower edge of the screen, to scroll articles by a line,

- move mouse cursor to the left or right edge of the screen, to scroll articles left or right by a column,

- drag the progressbar (scrollbar) thumb to quickly position articles,

- click on the progressbar beyond the thumb to cause scrolling by a page,

- press home or end key to scroll an article to the beginning or to the end.

Some other legacy key combinations also exist:

- shift+arrow down/up work like page down/up,

- ctrl+home and ctrl+end work like home and end,

- ctrl+page up and ctrl+page down also work like home and end,

- left and right in single-column articles scroll by a page up and down.

The user may move between visible links either using left and down arrow keys, or pointing the links with mouse. To enter (activate) a link the user may press enter, ctrl+right arrow or simply click left mouse button on that link. This way the user enters an article or causes some external action (e.g. starts a web browser).

To exit an article and return to a previous one, the user may click right mouse button, press backspace, esc or ctrl+left arrow.

To quit the Interface being in the main article (e.g. menu), the user may double click right mouse button, press backspace or esc. In any other article the user may press F10, alt+q or alt+x.

Pressing keys 1 through 8 the user can select a tune. Of course the actual number of available tunes depends on an issue. To select a tune entered at commandline (e.g. with /music switch), the user may press F3 key. To turn off the music, the user may press 0 key.

If an issue (or an article) contains more than one background image/theme, the other themes can be selected using ctrl+number keys (numbers 1 through 9 are available).

Other available keys:

- F1 - display help,

- F2 - save current article to disk in HTML, if only possible,

- F4 - enable/disable effects (e.g. smooth scrolling) at run-time,

- F7 - search through articles by words,

- ctrl+enter - copy selected link to clipboard.

Chris Dragan