Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/05/20/22:49:27
Marc Iven writes:
>I've an old truevision targa+ (graphic) card, and would like to make it
>work with allegro. Is there any generic graphic card in allegro that I
>can use to start from? What steps would be necessary to include a new
>graphic card in allegro?
The easiest solution is to install SciTech's Display Doctor package
(http://www.scitechsoft.com). This is commercial, but supports pretty
much every graphics card and will give you reliable and efficient VESA
support.
Even better would be to make a Targa driver for the FreeBE/AF project:
see http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/freebe/. This is geared mostly at
supporting hardware acceleration, but there is no reason why it cannot
contain simple framebuffer drivers as well. Adding a driver here rather
than directly in Allegro has the advantage that it can be dynamically
loaded (avoiding bloat of Allegro executable sizes), and that it can be
used by other VBE/AF programs (eg. the MGL library) as well as just
Allegro.
If you really want to add this directly into Allegro, it is probably
best to just take one of the existing drivers (eg. S3) and modify it.
You will need to add things to a few other sources as well, eg.
allegro.h, gfxdrv.c, bank.s, and interndj.h. There is no proper
documentation for the driver interface, but it isn't all that complex so
you should be able to figure things out just by looking at how the
current drivers work...
--
Shawn Hargreaves - shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/
"Miracles are nothing if you've got the wrong intentions" - Mike Keneally
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