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From: warwick@cs.uq.oz.au (Warwick Allison)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Graphics on the STE - v. generally speaking...
Message-ID: <818@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au>
Date: 16 Apr 91 05:12:55 GMT
References: <1991Apr3.051045.1894@ns.network.com> <1991Apr03.150135.26529@chinet.chi.il.us> <40922@cup.portal.com> <1991Apr5.231704.19657@jato.jpl.nasa.gov> <1563@ipsi.UUCP>
Sender: news@cs.uq.oz.au
Reply-To: warwick@cs.uq.oz.au
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>How about Player/Missile Graphics for at least the *&^% mouse cursor,
>I can not believe that in the nineties we still got to  erase the cursor,
>draw something, turn it on again, erase the cursor draw something , turn
>it on again (*)
 :
>(*)Probably the Amiga does that right

I can not believe that in the nineties there are STILL people who want
hardware to provide anything but the bare essentials.

Hardware sprites are just crap.  How many do you want?  16 enough?  256?
and how shall you allocate them to processes?  They would be just another
pain-in-the-neck limited resource.  But faster you say?  Maybe in the old
days of 8-bit computers they were worthwhile:  when the processors were
slow and the graphics was poor quality anyway.

"at least [for] the [fucking] mouse cursor" you say?  Yeah, sure, then
EVERY game every made would use the mouse pointer as a sprite, sending
mouse motion packets to the OS to make it mouse.  Hey, great! :-)

Ciao,
Warwick.

ps. Why do we whinge so much about our machines?  From the crap PD stuff
I've seen around, and the crap commercial stuff, Atari users need to
learn a bit of computer science before they cry to the designers about
missing features.  Personally, I think the ST is a fine machine.
--
  _--_|\   	warwick@cs.uq.oz.au
 /      *  <--	Computer Science Department,
 \_.--._/ 	University of Queensland,
       v    	AUSTRALIA.