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From: bcw@rti.rti.org (Bruce Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms.programmer
Subject: Re: Suitability of Windows platform
Summary: bitblt and animation
Message-ID: <1991Mar10.170726.27786@rti.rti.org>
Date: 10 Mar 91 17:07:26 GMT
References: <27331@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <1991Mar8.014410.22510@qualcomm.com> <28223@spudge.UUCP>
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, RTP, NC
Lines: 36

In article <28223@spudge.UUCP>, johnm@spudge.UUCP (John Munsch) writes:
> In article <1991Mar8.014410.22510@qualcomm.com> rdippold@maui.qualcomm.com (Ron Dippold) writes:
> >In article <27331@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> jdb@reef.cis.ufl.edu (Brian K. W. Hook) writes:
> >>6.  How good is Windows in doing frame animation?
> >It sucks.  Horribly.  You can't do page flipping or any other reasonable
> >way of animation.
> If you had a video card with a high speed blitter and a video driver that
> took advantage of it, it wouldn't be so bad.  It wouldn't be as smooth as
> animation on an Amiga because ther are no provisions for double buffering,
> but it wouldn't be terrible.  Without a blitter though, it sucks louder 
> than a Hoover.  Believe me, I've done it.

It sort of depends on what kind of animation you want.  If you want
full-screen real-time animation, maybe even with perspective a la 
Flight Simulator, this comment is probably justified.  If you would be 
satisfied with a cartoon-like animation of small object(s) moving 
against a static background, the bitblt operation is sufficient, though 
it might be a bit jerky on 4.77 MHz 8088 machines or even on slow 
286 machines, depending on how big the objects are and how many of 
them there are.  If you just want to show occasional movement of the
observer in a static 3-d environment, it may be barely adequate.

On true full-screen animation you might even be able to see the new
bitmap roll down the screen on top of the old bitmap, especially on a
slow machine (probably not on a fast 386 though).

The multimedia version of Windows (and presumably Windows V3.1 when
it finally comes out) is supposed to have a more efficient bitblt
algorithm that takes advantage of 286 and 386 instructions if it
is running on one of those machines.  I don't know if it would make
enough difference to make true animation reasonable, but Microsoft
themselves say that the first release of the multimedia version will
concentrate on sound rather than on video - waiting for the video
hardware to catch up with things like hardware blitters.

						Bruce C. Wright