Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mcnc!ncsuvx!news From: kdarling@hobbes.ncsu.edu (Kevin Darling) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Let's pretend Keywords: Intel, 586, windows Message-ID: <1990Dec19.115110.15070@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> Date: 19 Dec 90 11:51:10 GMT References: <3042@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <450@lysator.liu.se> <1990Dec18.213506.645@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> <1990Dec19.052844.4083@kithrup.COM> Sender: news@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu (USENET News System) Organization: NCSU Computing Center Lines: 31 |In <1990Dec19.052844.4083@kithrup.COM> sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes | |>In <1990Dec18.213506.645@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> kdarling@hobbes.ncsu.edu (Kevin Darling) writes: |>I believe the Intel 82786 gfx chip does have this support now. Each |>window is a different section of memory, and can be of virtually any mode... | |They should not go into CPU's (my opinion). Agreed, tho in this case it's not. The 82786 is a graphics display and coprocessor chip meant to be used in addition to the normal cpu. It's pretty nice from what I've read about it: Shares 4meg RAM with the cpu All the usual blit/draw functions, plus display zoom/pan each window Display modes include 640x480x256 up to 1024x1024x2 or can sync several to go to even higher color res But the nice thing from my standpoint (writing windowing drivers) is that each "window" is a _separate_ packed-bitmap (up to 32K x 32K pixels) in the shared memory... the 82786 takes care of combining them on the screen. You can have up to 16 displayed windows per scan-line, which seems a good start (no limit vertically). And each displayed window can be of 1-8 bits per pixel in depth (the 82786 changes modes on the fly per window). The start-pos/size of each window is settable on pixel boundaries. So it sounds almost ideal to me. I wouldn't have to worry about overlapping windows or forcing all windows/screen into one mode, etc. Thx for reminder, btw... I need to get the price on these devils. For a good article on this chip, see BYTE August 1987 (!). After all this time, I had figured the chip had never come out, but then I saw an ad for a terminal using it, a few weeks ago. best - kev