sjh@briar.philips.com (Stephen Herman;6072;2.46d;$0310) (01/30/90)
Late spring of 1989 I was told by SUN that they will release an 8-bit color simulator for their new 24-bit color frame store systems so that software developed for 8-bit color systems should run without problems on 24-bit color systems. Has anyone seen such a simulator and has had any experience with it? I have an upgrade to my Sun 4/110 in house that is waiting to be installed. It will convert my 4/110 8-bit unit to a 4/330 24-bit color unit. However, I am concerned that several software packages important to me on a daily basis, including Framemaker, do not support 24-bit color. In fact, Framemaker bombs out the display on an other 24-bit Sparcstation in the house. So I would like to have the 8-bit simulator to keep exisiting packages going while I proceed with my full color work. Any advice would be appreciated, including the order number for the 8-bit simulator, if it exists. Stephen Herman Philips Labs 914-945-6072
evgabb@uunet.uu.net (Rob Gabbard) (02/07/90)
In article <4543@brazos.Rice.edu>, sjh@briar.philips.com (Stephen Herman;6072;2.46d;$0310) writes: > Late spring of 1989 I was told by SUN that they will release an 8-bit > color simulator for their new 24-bit color frame store systems so that I haven't heard of any such beast but you should be able to run an 8-bit application on the CG9 (GXP) as long as they linked with the shared libraries. The problem is that it will run sloooooooowwwwww ! The reason for this is that as soon as you define a color table via pixrect/pixwin/cgi the CG9 goes into 8-bit emulation mode and its about as slow as running the software 8086 emulator on my Amiga :-). Pixrect now uses an XBGR format for pixel colors on the CG9. Instead of specifying a color table index the value is a packed decimal with the low order byte red, next blue, next green and the high order bit is empty. The way to convert between your color table and an XBGR value is the following: xbgr = red[index] + (blue[index] << 8) + (green[index] << 16); assuming your color table is loaded up in red, green and blue; If Sun is coming out with a quick way to do this I would be very interested as well. Rob Gabbard (uunet!sdrc!evgabb) _ /| Workstation Systems Programmer \'o.O' Structural Dynamics Research Corporation =(___)= U