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From: baer@qiclab.uucp (Ken Baer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Journeyman V1.1 (was Re: Imagine)
Summary: writing to Toaster
Message-ID: <1990Dec26.185603.28417@qiclab.uucp>
Date: 26 Dec 90 18:56:03 GMT
References: <1990Dec22.035100.12065@lavaca.uh.edu> <1990Dec23.062224.10652@qiclab.uucp> <1990Dec26.005959.4068@NCoast.ORG>
Organization: Animators Anonymous, Portland, OR.
Lines: 35

In article <1990Dec26.005959.4068@NCoast.ORG> jamiep@NCoast.ORG (Jamie
Purdon) writes: 
|| | I'm kinda pissed since newer products 
|| |are magically bound to the framebuffer their owning company makes.  

|| At this point we would prefer to support the Toaster, since it's what 
|| we have, and it has the best NTSC output of all the buffers.  But, so
|| far, NewTek hasn't provided anything to developers to deal with the
|| hardware directly.  Their approach seems to be to wait till they 
|| provide developers with functions that access all of the Toaster's 
|| features, rather than provide some lower level support (like writing
|| to the buffer) now, and the fancy stuff later.

|"Writing to a buffer" is available, now, to every Toaster owner.
|ARexx lets you access the hardware through ToasterPaint.
|    
|ToasterPaint (software, which is bundled with the Toaster,) can be
|very easily used for Toaster rendering, through it's ARexx interface.

Sounds good in theory, but there are major problems with this.  The big
one is memory!  I takes 7Megs just to run ToasterPaint.  Add on top of that
the memory it takes for a renderer to do it's thing (for us it's 3 to 5 Megs,
and it's a LOT more for polygon based systems).  I'm sorry, but going through
ToasterPaint is not a solution.  NewTek needs to provide a more direct path
to the hardware if they want any other developers to support the Toaster (which
we very much want to do!).

>Jamie Purdon, Author of DigiPaint1/3.0, ToasterPaint
>bix: jamiep


-- 
    //    -Ken Baer.  Programmer/Animator, Hash Enterprises / Earthling
  \X/     Usenet: baer@qiclab.UUCP  or  PLink: KEN BAER
         "What?!? Sore again?" -- Bugs Bunny to Yosemity Sam