Jimis wrote:
> Hello everyone.
>
> I don't know if anyone has noticed but there are some things that could
> be reprogrammed in arachne and make it work much faster.
> In particular, I believe that the routine that prints fonts to screen is
> not optimized. Since I work in a 286 machine, many imperfections are
> visible to me 'cause they are not covered by processor speed.
I agree. I am using Arachne on HP-LX with 8 Mhz 8086 compatible CPU time
to time, so some imperfections are visible also to me;-) But CGA mode is
faster than 16color VGA mode.
>
> What I mean is that other graphics programs that use the same screen
> resolution (like Windoze or DosShell in graphics mode) print characters
> to screen really fast, only a bit slower than in text mode. But arachne
> is really slow and most times I can see the text being printed slowly.
Yes. it is caused by 16 colour (4 bit) VGA mode. Code is optimized for
8bit color depth (byte per pixel), and then the buffer is globaly
converted to 4 bit....
>
> It would be a could idea to write an optimized WriteFontToScreen routine
> since a lot of speed can be earned for two reasons:
> i) It is one of the most often used routines in the arachne program
> ii) The current routine used is REALLY slow and can be MUCH better.
It is ok in 2bit, 8 bit and 16 bit colour depth, only 4 bit is slow.
Graphics library used by Arachne, X_LOPIF,
was already officialy released as LGPL, but as all comments, etc. are in
Czech, and there is no DOS, I was afraid to put it online. As Clarence
Verge is also interested in adding Hercules support, I think I should
document the library somehow (which is problem, because I am not its
author), and upload it to gnu.arachne.cz ...
It would be also nice if someone can write direct Xlib support to Linux
version of X_LOPIF. Currently only SVGAlib and GGI are supported, and
GGI over X is not exactly optimal solution, to be true...
