Hi James, I noticed your post on the XFree86 mailing list about needing graphics support for games on Linux and that you are having problems with DGA (root access etc), and are worried about the future of DGA. DGA's days are numbered, because the developers can't be bothered with it. I tried to get the on the right path with DGA V2 to make it more like DirectX, but nobody listened. They will still sit there and tell you that they know better and than DGA is pointless, but I can tell you from our experience that it is not.
However, forget about DGA. Have you taken a look at our SciTech SNAP Graphics product line and our SciTech MGL graphics library? We have support for just about all graphics cards on the market (completely plug and play), and fully support Linux console modes. Not only can you get direct framebuffer access, but you also get access to a complete suite of hardware accelerated 2D functionality including 2D sprite support using bitmaps stored in offscreen memory. DGA was never extended to support this, not matter how hard I fought to have this added. We also have some code in development to allow user apps to run without needing root privledges, provided a small kernel module is loaded into the kernel to enable the features we require. You can find out more about the SciTech SNAP Graphics SDK here: http://tinyurl.com/28ra3 > Apologies if this is the incorrect list to post to but i > couldn't decide between the general "forum" list or this one. My > question concerns the DGA extension in XFree86, whether it will be > removed from future versions, and the alternatives. We are > currently in the process of developing games for the Linux OS. We > require direct access to the video framebuffer, the ability to > change resolution, refresh rate, indexed palettes, and the ability > to alter the start screen position pointer (for hardware > scrolling). At first we wrote our 2D drawing libs to use SVGALib, > but after numerous problems with memory leaks and bad support for > many gfx cards we switched to X11->DGAv2. We are reasonably happy > with DGA as it stands, with the only annoyance being that it > requires root privs. I have seen it mentioned that DGA could be > removed in future XFree86 releases, is this true? If so, what are > the alternatives for us to use? It is obvious that there are alot > of apps out there that really can't justify the use of DGA, but I > feel that this application (games) really can benefit from using > it. Any extra layers between our drawing and the framebuffer is > just extra overhead and latency for us... > > Any sugestions or comments appreciated... Regards, --- Kendall Bennett Chief Executive Officer SciTech Software, Inc. Phone: (530) 894 8400 http://www.scitechsoft.com ~ SciTech SNAP - The future of device driver technology! ~ _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
