Hi Folks -
I've done two interesting improvements to the Win32 VM mostly for production uses. First, fetch the latest Windows VM from:
http://squeakvm.org/win32/release/SqueakVM-Win32-3.10.5-bin.zip
and run it. Aaaahhhh! What a nice splash screen ;-) The reason for the (optional) splash screen is that I finally got beaten into delaying the main window creation up until the point when there is something to show but unfortunately this also leads to the problem that if the time to show something interesting is a couple of seconds there is no user-visible feedback about the application launch, so the splash screen support became necessary (shame on the Mac VM for delaying window creation without splash screen! ;-)
Of course, not being the artist myself, I'd appreciate a nicer looking splash screen by someone a little more artistically inclined, and that could mean fame and ... err ... fame for you!
(see also http://squeakvm.org/win32/settings.html for the updated documentation on the splash screen settings)
The other relevant production improvement in this VM are a few new system attributes which report very detailed information about the current platform:
* Smalltalk getSystemAttribute: 10001 Reports detailed hardware information, for example:
Hardware information: Manufacturer: Panasonic Model: R5 Number of processors: 1 Page size: 4096
Memory Information (upon launch): Physical Memory Size: 1038384 kbytes Physical Memory Free: 330896 kbytes Page File Size: 1987776 kbytes Page File Free: 1332884 kbytes Virtual Memory Size: 2097024 kbytes Virtual Memory Free: 1931968 kbytes Memory Load: 68 percent
Processor 0: Genuine Intel(R) CPU U1400 @ 1.20GHz Identifier: x86 Family 6 Model 14 Stepping 8 ~MHZ: 1197
* Smalltalk getSystemAttribute: 10002 Reports detailed OS information, for example:
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP (Build 2600 Service Pack 2) Registered Owner: Registered Company: SP major version: 2 SP minor version: 0 Suite mask: 100 Product type: 1
* Smalltalk getSystemAttribute: 10003 Reports detailed Graphics information, for example:
Display Information: Graphics adapter name: Mobile Intel(R) 945GM/GU Express Chipset Family Primary monitor resolution: 1024 x 768
Device: Mobile Intel(R) 945GM/GU Express Chipset Family Adapter String: Mobile Intel(R) 945GM/GU Express Chipset Family Bios String: Intel Video BIOS Chip Type: Intel(R) GMA 950 DAC Type: Internal Memory Size: 0x08000000
Driver Versions: igxprd32: 6.14.10.4785
All of the above can be extremely helpful if you need to find out about a problem and, perhaps most importantly, the information is also written in crash.dmp if the Squeak VM ever crashes. This information has allowed us to successfully debug a few problems that would be otherwise very hard to find.
As usual, the sources for this version are up on squeakvm.org as well:
http://squeakvm.org/win32/release/SqueakVM-Win32-3.10.5-bin.zip
Enjoy, - Andreas