Blog - The Costa GUI

New release of Costa - version 1.6.0

Posted on the 6th of June, 2022

It’s that time again - a new version of Costa has been released, after almost 6 months of waiting. This time, the most notable feature is the ability to switch between two screen modes on-the-fly - EGA and VGA. Almost all icons have been replaced with new ones in order to rid Costa of the only proprietary content that was included, and a new default theme is used. And, as always, there are bugfixes and other improvements.

Graphics modes - EGA and VGA

Posted on the 18th of May, 2022

Since its inception in 2004, Costa has always used VGA graphics. More specifically, it used the standard VGA 640x480 pixels resolution, with 16 colors. I chose this resolution, because I liked the relatively sharp graphics it can produce, and the amount of screen real estate it provides. But, this graphics mode has a couple of drawbacks.

Continually optimizing, and replacing icons

Posted on the 2nd of May, 2022

Work on optimizing Costa continues. Some time ago, I wrote about how all image and config files were replaced with binary files, rather than the human-readable formats they were in. This had a couple of advantages in regard to speed.

New release of Costa - version 1.5.0

Posted on the 29th of December, 2021

Just in time before the new year, Costa version 1.5.0 has finished testing and has been released. This version comes with many improvements and changes, but three stand out from the rest: A new UI design based on Costa 0.9.4, massive speed improvements to handling of data files, and full keyboard support in all accessories. Code optimizations have also helped reduced the combined size of Costas executables significantly.

Error handling galore - and optimizations

Posted on the 23rd of December, 2021

With all the recent changes to Costa, namely the changes to all file formats, came the opportunity to really go through the code and try to make sure all file related errors are handled properly.