On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Kevin Lawton wrote:
> For video, the SDL library can give access to video/audio either
> via other services (like via X windows), or by accessing the raw
> hardware. There's some SDL code in the plugins already - I haven't
> tested it yet. Either the VGA emulation (yep it's slow), or a
> guest OS driver could communicate with a plugin to handle video/audio.
> This would give you the option for full-screen video, and potentially
> make use of the raw accelerations on the video card etc. Should
> be efficient.
>
I've heard about SDL in previous discussions on the list, and it sounds
like a good approach - fast ans portable (2nd is especially important to
Bochs which runs on different hardware), I hope it provides direct access
to framebuffer as well, so 13h mode (and perhaps VESA LFB as well) can be
emulated efficiently, so it can get rid of extra video buffering and don't
waste cpu cycles for screen update. I also personally think that Bochs,
being an emulator has other advantages besides running on other
architectures, including the possiblity of smoothly reducing the
performance of virtual cpu, which would be nice for some very old apps.
The importance of x86 emulation could become even more important when the
x86 architecture will get less popular and outdated.
Uhus
