BeOS support

XaoS has pretty advanced support for BeOS R4. It works on both PowerPC and Intel platforms, supports multithreading, the clipboard, file dragging, has native look and feel and can work as an image translator from XaoS files to images.

The first version of the BeOS driver was written by Jens Kilian and later extended by Jan Hubicka.

Installation

You can start the installation script to do everything for you. If you want something special, read this section.

In order for XaoS to work you need to keep the executable together with its data files (help, examples, catalogs and the tutorials directory)

When first started, XaoS registers two new mime types called image/x-xaos-position for XaoS Position Files and video/x-xaos-animation for XaoS Animation Files, registers icons for them and sets itself as default application.

Available display drivers

XaoS supports following drivers:

BeOS: Standard windowed driver using application server
DirectWindow: Driver done using Game Kit's direct window class
WindowScreen: Fullscreen driver.

By default, XaoS starts in windowed mode and uses the application server for output. You could change the driver to DirectWindow to use direct access to video RAM. Note that this mode is slower in most cases, and not supported by some videocards.

The BeOS driver by default chooses the most similar bitmap supported by XaoS to achieve best and fastest results. In the UI menu you can change this default choice to another one if you wish. Also you can ask the BeOS and DirectWindow to resize to fullscreen mode.

XaoS also supports real fullscreen mode using the BWindowScreen API. To switch XaoS to this driver, use the UI menu. If you want to use this mode by default, use the -driver WindowScreen command line option.

This driver differs a lot from windowed ones. It use direct access to the video card, allowing you to change video mode. Also, the 256 color mode can access the palette, so it is not dithered like the windowed mode. Because BeOS can't do GUI in fullscreen mode, XaoS uses its own toolkit. I hope you will feel confortable in it.

XaoS as translator

You should be able to open XaoS files in graphics applications such as ShowImage or ArtPaing. In Preferences you can find the DataTranslations program, that can be used to set the size, type and DPI of the resulting image. Also antialiasing can be enabled.

Note that translation can take a while. So be patient and wait for the result.

If the translator doesn't work, ensure that you have a link to the XaoS executable in /boot/beos/system/add-ons/Translators/.