CyberGraphX 4.0 or Picasso96?

[Karlos]

I quite like both systems. For the moment I use CGX on my amiga since my BVision isnt supported by P96. I use P96 under WinUAE.

As for feature sets, there's actually very little to choose between them. P96 runs most CGX code OK, and both systems do most of their work by patching the graphics.library routines anyway.

The things that irritate me immensely about both is that neither system really makes use of any real acceleration beyond basic blitting and viewport scrolling (sometimes).

Many cards support things like transparent blits, strectched blits (ideal for BlitBitMapScale()) and have hardware drawing operations that could be used to accelerate most stuff used in the OS (lines, polygons, bitmap text rendering etc.). None of this is really utilised fully in either system. I am sure they are capable but the drivers are just not optimized I guess.

Something that *absolutely* should have been introduced but never was, is a truecolour graphics.library clone that uses absolute colour definitions instead of pens. The original graphics.library is ok for 8-bit RTG screens but it's a total pain in the bum (and a complete waste) for high/true colour. That was an almost criminal oversight and the original developers should be rounded up and shot for this :lol:

[Karlos]

@Kronos

Well, cybergraphics 5 may indeed have these features, but that's of no use to AmigaOS 3.x users whatsoever, will be likely no use to OS4 or AROS either unless ports are sanctioned. So basically its as good as useless to the amiga developer community as a whole.

Irrespective of this, my actual point is that it should have been there since the first day the 8-bit screen depth limit was exceeded and there is simply no reasonable excuse why it wasn't.

[Karlos]

@Kronos

Kronos wrote:

Both P96 and CGX patch graphics and layers.library but to get real 24bit you would have to completly rewrite both and a great portion of intuition too.

Well, not especially. I am saying they should have introduced a parallel system for graphics rendering that was a graphics.library like API. Since a gfx card would be required to use it anyway software needing to use 15/16/24 bit gfx stuff could use it instead of graphics.library for rendering.
As long as you ensure that stuff can be hooked into intuition and so on, it would be no more work than was required to patch into intution and layers anyway.

Oh well...;-)

[Karlos]

@Kronos

Just because EGS was pants doesn't mean the idea is. EGS problem was that it was a bit too different from the rest of the system.

Still, this argument is totally academic anyway since CGX5 has true colour rendering, as does AROS, as will have OS4;x's AG2...

The fat crying shame, of course is that they will all evolve in different directions scuppering developers who want to run their apps on all 3 systems.

An abstraction layer for true colour graphics implemented on each system would be a nice idea...

bloodline wrote:

AROS does indeed do such a thing, you really should join up to the dev list you and your skills would be most welcome.

Thanks. I am kind of busy with some work for the forseeable, even my own developer projects are on hold...

Still, once that is done, get yourself an extremely large carrot and dangle it just ahead of me... :-)