[comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt] Color Cursors and Circle Drawing Speed Problems

kriso@northstar.dartmouth.edu (Kris Olander) (09/14/89)

We at Dartmouth are having some trouble with the R3 Xibm server in
two ways: cursor colors and circle drawing speed.

The first problem has to do with being able to change the cursor color via rgb 
values on an IBM 8514 color display.  We have an X11 version of magic 
(Berkeley's VLSI tools) ported to X11 by Marco Papa at the Advanced Computing 
Suppot Center (ACSC) at USC, that uses XCreatePixmapCursor() to set the cursor 
color.  This client program creates the correct color on our DecStation3100 
server but seems to always leave the cursor as the "black" colormap entry (I 
don't know if that's pixel 0 or 1 - it's the same pixel value as the cursor in 
all the other windows) on an IBM 6152 with an 8514 display regardless of the 
rgb values we give XCreatePixmapCursor().
Since cursor color setting works properly on the Dec X server (and even on 
earlier Xibm servers), we are confident that the problem is not in the client or
xlib.   We are eager to fix this problem because magic sets its background color
to the same color the cursor is stuck on (which makes the cursor disappear  - 
very annoying).
 
Another problem we are experiencing with the R3 Xibm is VERY slow circles.  We 
know that either filled circles or hollow circles (or both) got at least an 
order of magnitude slower between R2 Xibm and R3 Xibm.  We have an application 
that displays crystal lattices in 3d (lots of circular atoms) that suffers 
horribly when run under R3.  The slowdown occurs on both 8514 and apa16 graphics
hardware (run in 6152 and RT workstations, respectively).

NOTE:  We have applied patches 1-9 on our X11R3 source.  We have
	also taken the latest ibm-rt...tar.Z file off of expo and compiled a 
	new Xibm.


Any information about these problems or suggestions of how we should
go about fixing them would be very welcome!


				Mark Franklin,
				markf@northstar.dartmouth.edu

or,

# Kris Olander ---- ---- arpa: kriso@northstar.dartmouth.edu #
# ---------------------------------------------------------- #
# System Eng. Project NORTHSTAR                              #
# Thayer School of Eng., Dartmouth College                   #