lshaw@walt.cc.utexas.edu (logan shaw) (09/16/90)
In article <1990Sep15.202651.8892@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita) writes: >320x400 mode and no flicker-fixing. The Toaster, Firecracker and >Mimetics are all framebuffers which would require programmers to >work at the bitmap level. DCTV as I understand it doesn't support >the workbench and screens. > > Therefore, the <$200 800x600 w/ 256 out of 16.7M color >VGA board for the IBM, from the users perspective, is far better >than DCTV or HAM-E because at least their CAD program will >support it! This is a good point. Commodore needs to come up with one of two things: A _standard_ for improved graphics that all third party manufacturers will make stuff compatible with -or- A standard way of dealing with enhanced graphic devices -- sort of a modularized, object-oriented way of drawing to a screen. Intuition will call routines to draw to a generic screen. Intuition would also be able to ask a screen how many colors it has, what its resolution, etc. Maybe it could be done with a device driver. You would be able to ask it to draw boxes, lines, points, text, etc. All of this would be transparent to the software, so that my rendering software could work with your nifty-neato 182 bitplane, 16 billion pixel display board without thinking about it. Sorta like the way SCSI works - you ask a drive about itself when you're formatting it. > -- Ethan > >Ethan Solomita: es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu > >*Iraq += *Kuwait; >NumCountries--; > >and by popular demand... > >free(Kuwait); for (week = 0; ;week++) { for (country = 0; country < NUM_COUNTRIES; country++) { Condemn (Iraq, country); Avoid (actually_doing_anything, country); } Delay (1000L); } ============================================================================ "The beauty queen, clevely clad, Logan Shaw admires herself in a cigarette ad. lshaw@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu Will she admit that all was in vain ======================== when the face in her mirror cracks like a windowpane?" -Elim Hall, _Things_Break_