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From: farren@sat.com (Michael J. Farren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: OS Graphic Card Support: Part II!
Message-ID: <1991Feb18.210422.5446@sat.com>
Date: 18 Feb 91 21:04:22 GMT
References: <28532.27b759c9@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <1991Feb13.064714.9347@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> <18989@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Organization: SAT, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 20

daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) writes:

>On the Atari, as I gather, the VDI is unused by lots of programs.

For the Atari version of SSI's STORM ACROSS EUROPE, *I* certainly didn't.
Using VDI would have meant an inordinate penalty in terms of overhead,
in both code and data terms.  Not only that, the speed penalty was
significant, as were the limitations of the VDI interface.  Things
which the Amiga's OS made easy were impossible with the Atari VDI - and
I'm talking about simple things like multicolored cursors, or text
modes other than JAM2 (with no control of the background color, yet!).
Perhaps it's just that I am not familiar enough with the intricacies of
the Atari VDI to get it to do what I wanted - but when it took only a
couple of hours to write a custom routine which did *EXACTLY* what I
needed, as opposed to many hours or even days trying to coax the VDI
into giving me something *CLOSE* to that, my choice was clear.

In short: if anyone builds a VDI equivalent for the Amiga, you'd be
doing us all a disservice if it were not reasonably close to the "bare"
system interface, both in speed and in utility.