Xref: utzoo comp.sys.amiga:74848 comp.sys.amiga.tech:17128 comp.sys.amiga.hardware:5184 Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!mintaka!wookumz.ai.mit.edu!rjc From: rjc@wookumz.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.amiga.tech,comp.sys.amiga.hardware Subject: Re: Retargetable graphics. Temporary Stop-gaps. Keywords: rtg,iff,24bit,video hardware Message-ID: <1990Dec19.175634.19203@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> Date: 19 Dec 90 17:56:34 GMT References: <12437@life.ai.mit.edu> <16612@cbmvax.commodore.com> <7307@sugar.hackercorp.com> Sender: daemon@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu (Lucifer Maleficius) Organization: None Lines: 27 In article <7307@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes: >In article <16612@cbmvax.commodore.com> daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) writes: >At least any such RTG interface should provide the same basic interface as >graphics.library. Why even consider anything else? > >In the previous article, someone not Dave Haynie wrote: >> Now I'm not suggesting running Intuition screens on video boards/frame >> buffers. > >Why not? This has been hashed and rehashed before, but I'll explain. Intuition and graphics.library are very tuned to the graphics chip set. How many frame buffers have sprites? A copper? Scrollable bitplanes? A display co-processor? The sad fact of it is, dragable screens, viewports, super bitmap screens, sprites aren't availible on most framebuffers. Some hardware doesn't even use bitplane format(for instance, Chunky Pixmaps). To get around this it may take a year of programming and bug testing to emulate this kind of stuff. We can't wait that long. We need something to make ray-tracers, paint programs, and video processing software work on now. Most of these kinds of programs open up a custom screen and dump scanlines to it directly bypassing intuition. >-- >Peter da Silva. `-_-' >.