On Wed, 8 Mar 2000, Thad Phetteplace wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I am curious what the status of harware accelerated 2D graphics
> on GGI is.
The same as it has been for a long time now |-/. The basic 2D
functions in LibGGI are accelerated on most targets which support 2D
acceleration, and LibGGI2D itself works but has no accelerated target
support.
> I started some work a year ago on adding transparent
> blitting, but then became buried in other work. I do have some
> code that uses to direct buffer access to do a transparent blit,
> and I could probably roll it into GGI, but hesitate to dive in
> if the work has already been done.
No, this work has not been done. We are deciding what is to be
done with LibGGI2D right now, though, and since there are some licensing
problems with it we may have to rewrite it or replace it with another 2D
library. We don't know what's happening just yet, so hang on.
> The reason I ask is that I have a cross platform video game
> engine I am about to release as open source, but it is
> currently working with an old version of GGI. (some of you
> might remember my promises of releasing this beast a year
> ago... I really am close this time though!) If new 2D support
> has been added, I'll revamp my code to take advantage of it.
Essentially nothing has changed.
> And from the Frequenly Rehashed Topics department... what is
> the best recommended video card to use with GGI (and linux in
> general). I would like it to support 2D and 3D acceleration
> on linux, have a bunch of on-board ram, and not require a
> mortgage to purchase. :-)
A 3Dfx Voodoo card, probably. I'm using an older Voodoo II 12MB
card and the Glide target for GGI development right now and it is really
nice. I recommend Voodoo based cards for GGI development for the
following reasons:
* You can get an old Voodoo for dirt cheap these days. I have a Voodoo I
4MB card which is old and slow but works fine - I can send you this card
if you are interested in making use of it.
* You can program these cards with the Glide library. While Glide is
being phased out in favor of "real" 3Dfx device drivers, it remains the
most convenient way to drive a 2D/3D accelerated card outside of X under
Linux at the present time.
* Since the Voodoo II and older chipsets work with a VGA singal passthru
cable and 'piggyback' on top of your existing video card, the Voodoo is
also pretty much the best multihead development environments for GGI as
well. Very convenient to be able to run fullscreen accelerated 3D from
within X and not have to use or worry about the X server!
* The current LibGGI Glide target is one of the best-written and most
feature-complete targets available for Linux (the DirectX target is also
very well written but obviously doesn't run under Linux). It is pretty
much the fastest 2D accelerated target we have right now, which is pretty
impressive if you consider that Vodoo hardware doesn't really have 2D
accels!
* I am using the Glide target to build the first publically available
accelerated GGIMesa target, for the reasons given above. I have this
semi-working at home already, actually. I hope to be able to release the
accelerated GGIMesa Glide target code sometime next week.
Jon
---
'Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in
becoming one with God.'
- Scientist G. Richard Seed
