john@minster.york.ac.uk (01/30/89)
In <265@brolga.cc.uq.oz>, George Michaelson writes: >I used mgr (possibly in an earlier version) at ucl.cs and I would >say it is the best candidate yet for porting to minix. It is delightfully >simply coded, and considerably smaller both in terms of it's runtime >requirements and sourcecode than X. >I would suggest asking the people in York University who ported Blit to >the Atari-ST under GEMdos to comment on the work. >Given the variety of different IBM/PC graphics standards to be supported you >are looking at a LOT of different underlying models to assure it would work >under all available systems [ega/cga/hercules/brain-damaged-amstrad etc etc] >for all graphics and all meese. The reimplementation (not port) of the Blit code to a stand-alone Atari ST (not GEMDOS) was carried out by Nigel Roles, who no longer works here. (He moved to a software house in this fair city, and no longer has USENET access). The product is not in day-to-day use, or available for distribution. For background reading, see: "The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal", R. Pike, AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal, Vol. 63 No. 8, part 2 (1984). "Graphics in Overlapping Bitmap Layers", R. Pike, Computer Graphics Vol. 17, No. 3 (1983) or ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 2, 2 (1983). "Hardware/Software trade-offs for Bitmap Graphics on the Blit", R. Pike, B. Locanthi, J. Reiser, Software - Practice and Experience Vol. 15 No. 2 (1985). "Fast bitblt() with asm() and cpp()", B. Locanthi, EUUG Conference Proceedings, Dublin, September 1987. We havn't seen all of MGR yet, but greatly prefer small pieces of software. I concur with George that writing code to meet all IBM PC display and the Atari ST display standards will probably result in a lot of #defines in the kernel. Let's keep things small - if 7th edition has the answer, let's use that for Minix. If not, let's follow the tried and trusted Bell Laboratories traditions of design. Finally, let's not permit Minix for the PC and the ST to drift apart. PS. Surely it's `mousies', not meese? :-) John A. Murdie Experimental Officer