Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/11/01/12:30:59
Version 0.7 of the FreeBE/AF graphics driver project is now available
from http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/freebe/.
What is FreeBE/AF?
------------------
A free implementation of the VBE/AF graphics driver interface.
Currently provides hardware accelerated drivers for ATI mach64,
Cirrus 54xx, Matrox, and Trident TGUI cards, and a dumb framebuffer
driver for the Avance Logic chipset. At the moment this driver
interface is only supported by the Allegro library (you will need a
recent WIP version to take advantage of the hardware acceleration,
because this was not included in Allegro 3.0), but I would encourage
other developers to adopt it as well: VBE/AF is a massive
improvement over the VESA system!
What is VBE/AF?
---------------
An efficient, portable binary driver interface for controlling video
hardware. Corrects a lot of the performance and functionality
problems associated with the VESA standard, most importantly by
adding support for hardware accelerated drawing functions.
What has changed in this version
--------------------------------
Salvador Eduardo Tropea added a fully accelerated, portable driver
for the Trident TGUI 9440 chipset, and George Foot added a
non-accelerated driver for Avance Logic cards.
Future plans
------------
Remove all chipset-specific routines from Allegro (S3, Tseng,
Video7, Paradise, etc), and turn this code into FreeBE/AF drivers
instead. That will reduce the size of Allegro executables, and also
make these routines available in a standard format that other
programmers can use. Once this is finished, I think it will be time
for version 1.0 of FreeBE/AF to be uploaded somewhere more public
(probably the Allegro directory on SimTel).
--
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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