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Author Topic: CGX 4 and P96 SDK  (Read 18859 times)

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Offline Karlos

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Re: CGX 4 and P96 SDK
« Reply #14 from previous page: April 08, 2010, 08:02:19 PM »
Quote from: arnljot;552196
I don“t know the Amiga APIs or libraries well enough to understand this concept :)

How, in this "vision" is support for various buses and cards achieved in your mind? I would think that this would be delegated to a driver that know the chipset. The next problem is that this chipset can reside on a zorro bus, pci bus - or heaven forbid usb bus - LOL


The key to this, I think, is one of abstraction. This "new" graphics.library would itself be agnostic to the underlying hardware and thus need to sit on top of something lower level, in my mind. The additional functionality presented by existing rtg libraries would sit on top of the same layer and just expose the relevant features of it that the new graphics.library doesn't.

This lower layer would be responsible for detecting/managing the hardware bus and memory space, thus providing a consistent API for actual chip drivers, such that it doesn't matter if your graphics chip is attached by zorro or PCI. For the most part I see bus and memory management as different aspects of the same task - essentially how  you map the device's memory/register space into the system memory map such that the chip driver knows where the hardware registers/memory are located as well as the graphics.library's BitMap allocator knowing where to get video memory from.

I think a lot more thought is required though ;)
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Offline Karlos

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Re: CGX 4 and P96 SDK
« Reply #15 on: April 08, 2010, 08:57:43 PM »
TBH, I would suggest the first thing should be to gauge the level of interest.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: CGX 4 and P96 SDK
« Reply #16 on: April 08, 2010, 09:17:04 PM »
Interested, yes. Able, maybe not. I really don't seem to find the time for anything like this any more :-/
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Offline Karlos

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Re: CGX 4 and P96 SDK
« Reply #17 on: April 08, 2010, 09:34:06 PM »
Quote from: arnljot;552236
What does the CGX superlayers do? That is one of the CGX P96 differences?


I think it's an optimisation made to the handling of layers to reduce the amount of blitting/copying when refreshing many overlapping areas. Don't quote me on that, though.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: CGX 4 and P96 SDK
« Reply #18 on: April 08, 2010, 09:40:43 PM »
One of P96's features was that it supported CGX software too. Certainly everything I ever wrote for CGX (not including video overlay which I never investigated) also worked on P96.

I haven't really tried the other way around.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: CGX 4 and P96 SDK
« Reply #19 on: April 08, 2010, 09:47:55 PM »
My graphics card didn't even have a video overlay. It was faked using texture mapping, by the looks of things.
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