I agree......., X really isn't that portable in a non-network environment
(like that inside of an IA-32 AT PC). Also, all of the X handlers out there
(for things like WinNT) cost big $$ these days (unless you don't mind your
system dying every 2 hours.........), and I thought that was something that
we were trying to avoid. I hate to be really annoying, but anybody who
really wants to code the networking of WinNT applications using X/Xdm has to
be out of their bloody mind!! (No offense Kevin, really.) It is bad enough
to use X on the platform type that it was designed for!!
Also, we need to think about performance--if we have one highly optimized
virtual architecture that feeds into a NATIVE user-level client on some
system (X/Xdm on UNIX, aqua on the newest Apple/Macintosh, Win32/WDM/DirectX
on WinNT/95/98/2k/ME/& friends, and maybe an SVGAlib hack for the hell of it
when we get time....) then we will not be sapping up valuable execution time
painting pretty pictures into the UI. Bochs has proven that you can port a
decent GUI into the Win32 space from UNIX/LINUX, so why don't we learn from
that lesson & start there--optimizing with SDL ONCE WE GET SOMETHING THAT
WORKS!!!
Also on the Win32/WDM/DirectX front, we need to work out some way to handle
the monitor device in Windows. Windows runs (like LINUX) as much in
protected mode as is possible. This means that we are going to have to do
one of several things: deal with the Win32 swapping algorithm & hope it
doesn't kill us, write a user-space<-->hardware-space memory-mapping/locking
driver/program, or just at least something the lets the monitor run without
getting its head cut off by a Win32 "damn you piss me off" exception of some
sort.
Drew Northup, N1XIM
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf
> Of Ramon van Handel
> Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2000 3:36 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [plex86] Video architecture
>
>
> On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, Kevin Lawton wrote:
> > I thought "Networking NT Applications Using X" was pretty cool.
> [snip]
> > I'd like to start defining these set of primitives, and get some
> > people interested in writing drivers etc for them. We could actually
> > start with X, and write drivers for it, since there are
> toolkits to do this.
>
> The problem with using X is that it is not portable to other
> platforms...
> We already thought of the solution: use SDL in stead of X.
> Base your primitives on SDL, which is itself portable.
> Why switch back to X now?
>
> -- Ramon
>
>
>
