toddpw@jomby.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel) (04/04/91)
One of the things that I've gotten interested in is utilizing the power of the GS/OS driver structure to implement some things that would be otherwise impossible to do robustly. Examples include: TCP/IP (IP as supervisor, ICMP as req'd visible driver, etc.) EZ install VOC 400 line support Standard Graphics Card Interface (for applications, maybe QuickDraw...) The GS/OS ref is really sketchy about supervisors, and when I my copy of Orca/Disassembler arrives I'm going to pick apart the SCC and SCSI managers and see what makes them tick. Why I'm posting this: I want to know if anyone else is interested in developing a graphics card driver interface, for use by applications and (I hope) future versions of QuickDraw. The first two drivers to write would be for the motherboard and for the Video Overlay Card, and the core technology has to be the separation of object rendering from palette expansion into the frame buffer -- so that arbitrary pixel sizes can be supported by the driver, and nonlinear video buffers can be used (read: the Video Overlay Card's 400 line interlaced mode). Supervisors are probably useless here, and we want to support multiple cards from day 1. What I'm looking for is ideas and pointers to people who might be working on graphics cards. Todd Whitesel toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu