ZN wrote: 
> Which again makes me wonder, what kind of an offer does one have to come up
> with for Tony to make SMSQ/E open source? Or at least maintainble by
> someone else...

I have no idea.

> Anyway, having digested what you said about GD2, the conversion of
> everything to 16 bit is a serious problem (I could use a stronger term).

That's what I say. Even a simple background color (one!) uses up at
least a whole MB.
Some sort of "on-the-fly" RLE compression could help a bit but then
you have other problems, like that you don't know the size of the save
area in advance and that it also varies from time to time.

> IMHO the proper way to do this would be programs in lower modes to
> still have save areas in that mode.

I think the proper way is to leave the drawing to the applications.
But this would be a totally new concept for the QL world.

> Approach b) requires one more save area at all times, but guarantees that
> programs internally using lesser modes only use as much memory for the save
> areas as they really need. Considering that's a 8-fold saving in most cases
> it must be worth thinking about?

I'm with you on this one, but even I don't dare to mess this deep
around in the GD2 driver. I don't have enough knowledge about its
internals.

> I wonder if this concept is still used, or indeed, if it could be expanded.

No, the MODE command doesn't have any effect in 16bit mode.

Marcel

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