On 4/22/06, Jay R. Ashworth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 03:34:36PM -0600, William Ferrell wrote: > > On 4/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Yeah... as I say, I think that's why they didn't allow people to > > > actually put it on as text: that would be *much* easier to extract. > > > > > > But if you run your X server at 640x480, full screen, things ought to > > > work out just fine -- and quite a bit faster. > > > > Actually I think there's a less nefarious reason behind this (occam's > > razor, and all that) -- producing a graphics chip with far less > > computing horsepower and fewer features than an 8-bit NES is *way* > > cheaper than one that would have to do the graphics stuff, handle > > timing, *and* draw actual letters. > > You think? Hmm... Never really considered it. > > I think it might have been a push; when did CD+G hit?
Mid 90's was its big hurrah if I remember, though it was probably in development much longer. Early 90's would be my guess. The cost of hardware would have most definitely been a major factor in developing the standard. I wrote a proportional-spaced font blitter for an LCD once. *shudder* I'd honestly have rather stayed playing with just rendering fonts on my own software and blitting full-screen bitmaps to the sucker. > > You'd have to offer up different fonts, styles, etc., and send strings > > and timing info along to the chip instead of simple graphic > > instructions. The way it's done now, you can use whatever visual style > > you like as long as it can fit in the low-bandwidth constraints of the > > CD+G format. > > Yeah, but is that effect, or cause? :-) We'll never know for sure since none of us (that I know of :) were in the meetings :) It does make sense either direction though. Consider that even if they'd placed font-writing functionality in the spec, it'd have been in *addition* to, not in lieu of, what's already there -- scrolling, blitting color blocks, setting the palette, etc. Letter drawing was definitely feasible -- the NES was doing it years earlier with relatively little effort. You've got to figure they wanted to keep the thing as flexible as possible (even if font-writing were available, each label would want its own distinct style and feel -- that's definitely been achieved; DK, Sound Choice, StarDisc, and Top Hits Monthly all have very identifiable visual styles that I can pick out in an instant now that I've been KJ'ing for awhile). Leaving the font-drawing up to the graphic designers meant the spec could ship faster on cheaper hardware, and left the "fancy" stuff to the CD+G users (authors). It's much easier to generate a pretty graphics-only CD+G file on a PC than it is on the lil' player; this decision (if it went the way I think it did) shifted the work of getting the font shapes and positioning right from the player to the authoring platform. -- Looking for something to read? Visit http://willfe.com/ ... it's easy, safe, and fun for the whole family! ------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid0709&bid&3057&dat1642 _______________________________________________ Pykaraoke-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pykaraoke-discuss
