FBlit opensourced

[utri007]

Thanks all involved

Does anyone know current situation of FBlit? Is it developed know when it is open sourced?

[guest11527]

Does anyone know current situation of FBlit? Is it developed know when it is open sourced?

Well, given that it is hosted in github, and github only takes open source projects (unless you pay), I would say that it is open source pretty much right now. Or at least, if the upload of the source was legal in first place, which I do not know.

[kamelito]

@Thomas
it seems so :http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=78786&highlight=fblit

Kamelito

[trekiej]

If Commodore was to have increased resolution and color palette, do you think they would have just increased the number of bit planes and memory size?

[guest11527]

If Commodore was to have increased resolution and color palette, do you think they would have just increased the number of bit planes and memory size?

 No, not really. It's not that the AAA chipset wasn't in the making. But it came too late, and AGA was only considered a transitional technology. But as usual, CBMs investment into technology was too little and came too late.

[itix]

Even worse, the current implementation of the graphics library runs into a busy-wait to let the blitter complete, it does not perform smart things such as sending the CPU into a Wait(), where it could allow another task to take over.

The decision to use such a (IMHO stupid) design was based on the slow 68K CPU. Back then, the overall overhead of the CPU reacting on a blitter interrupt, and managing and mainting such interrupts was higher than just to run into WaitBlit(), so the design remained as stupid as it is today. Whether this estimate still holds for faster CPUs, i.e. busy-wait vs. Wait(), is unclear to me and is something that is probably worth trying. At least it could free the (much faster) CPU doing something useful instead of wainting for the blitter.

I think it makes perfect sense. Busy wait in WaitBlit() is stealing CPU cycles only from other tasks and only if the blitter is still busy. Most of time the CPU had nothing useful to do anyway.

Using interrupts would mean when the blitter is already finished when calling WaitBlit() the system has gone through relatively expensive system routines (clear signal, save task pointer somewhere for the interrupt handler, signal task when ready but the signal is maybe never used). There is also chance that task is unloaded from memory before blitting operation is finished what is perfectly legal situation.

[trekiej]

@ Thomas R.
Do you think from an engineering point of view that could be the case or is there another path to increasing color and resolution.

[guest11527]

@ Thomas R.
Do you think from an engineering point of view that could be the case or is there another path to increasing color and resolution.

I'm sorry, but I'm not quite clear what you question relates to. Could you please be more explicit?

[trekiej]

I sent a PM.