Subject: 
           Overhaul of "Matrix" screen saver mode
      Date: 
           Tue, 29 Jun 1999 03:33:45 -0700 (PDT)
     From: 
           Jeremy Buhler <jbuhler@cs.washington.edu>
 Reply-To: 
           xlock@tux.org
        To: 
           xlock@tux.org


I'm a big fan of the new Matrix mode in xlockmore 4.14, but I found its
Katakana font a little small for my taste.  So, I started hacking on
it to add a bigger font.  Before I quite knew it, I had majorly
overhauled the mode.  My patch to the stock 4.14 source tree is available
at

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/jbuhler/xlockmore-4.14-matrix.diff.gz

Changes include:

 * optimized screen display by using mostly screen-to-screen instead of
   mostly pixmap-to-screen copies (much faster on accelerated X servers)

 * roughly halved memory requirements by using only one pixmap per column
   instead of two, while preserving smooth scrolling

 * fixed some minor bugs, including double-freeing in matrix_release(),
   wrong options structure referenced in modes.c, and some display artifacts
   caused by leaving un-updated columns between pixmaps.

 * larger kana font (12x24 instead of 7x14) with numbers added

 * kana strings now always end with the same character, similar to what I
   think was in the movie's display

 * tweaked color scheme and display parameters (could still use some work
   by people who've seen the movie more often than I have)

 * minor code cleanups to make it easier to convert some of the display
   parameters (scrolling speed, string length, etc) to runtime options 
   in the future.

Please give the patch a try and let me know if it works for you.  It
looks great here, especially in a dark room accompanied by an
appropriate track from mp3.com ;-).

                                                  Jeremy Buhler
                                                  jbuhler@cs.washington.edu