From: "Salvador Eduardo Tropea (SET)" <salvador AT inti DOT edu DOT ar>
To: orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph, leathm AT gbrmpa DOT gov DOT au
Subject: Re: SVGALIB stuff
Cc: algikun AT santaka DOT sc-uni DOT ktu DOT lt, djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 16:19:23 +0300 (GMT)
Message-ID:  <9611261619.aa18800@ailin.inti.edu.ar>


>On Tue, 3 Dec 1996, Leath Muller wrote:
>> > BTW, isn't anybody thinking of porting Allegro to Linux? Have you heard of
>> > the GGI project? General Graphics Interface, that is. When GGI is done and
>> > Linus accepts it, Linux will have a graphics driver in the kernel, and the
>> > coolest thing, you will be able to use *any* acceleration or such feature
>> > of your video card. Given the simple and effective OSS (open sound system)
>> > driver present in Linux (and supportinf a lot of sound cards), Linux will
>> > become IDEAL for games and demos, which make most of stuff DJGPP is used
>> > for IMO. You should all switch to Linux one day, folks! Not that I'm
>> > saying DJGPP isn't great, of course.. :) :)
>> 
>> Shift to Linux? Ummm...and some people say that DJGPP is hard to set up
>> for the beginner... ;)
>> 
>> Leathal.
>> 

>YEAHYEAHYEAH!!!
>I'm sick 'n tired of having to fire up the monstrous and massive XEmacs
>whenever I wanna have a decent programming environment..

>The author of RHIDE said that the main part of porting RHIDE to Linux
>would be porting TVision right? 
That's right.

>as I understand it, the main obstacle
>(blobstacle?) is cursor-addressable text output (you would normally use
>Curses for this, which is quite inefficient for fast output).
Yeap, forget Curses.

>I had this idea though: is it possible to write text to the Linux console
>screen using direct writes into the video RAM? i.e. the old "poke it into
>0xb0000 or 0xb8000 trick"? after all, the Linux kernel leaves the upper
>384K of the lower 1MB untouched..
It's posible, SVGAlib makes that, is a nightmare of signal handling but access 
directly to the Video RAM.

>I was thinking, if at the minimum a cursor-positioning function and a
>text-with-attributes output function could be written, all the rest of the
><conio.h> functions could be re-expressed in terms of that and the entire
>TVision could be ported.
Not enough, you need at least a pointer to the screen to get a good speed, 
TVision is slow because is a heavy piece of code so if you put an slow output 
...

>Is something wrong with my grand vision? (one thing I can think of is, it
>will play hell with the virtual consoles!!!)
The nightmare in SVGALib is to avoid problems with the virtual consoles.

 Is just take some time to stude how SVGALib works and use part of it to access 
to the screen. I don't have time for it (I'm designing the editor of RHIDE), 
but I know that's posible to port the TVision to Linux and with it RHIDE.
 May be another solution is take a look at the code of the actual port of 
Tvision to Linux (I don't know where is that). 
 The hint is port the Robert's TVision to Linux because Robert is using a 
modified version of TVision (more coherent like the original, but hence 
incompatible).

SET

********************************************************************************
Salvador Eduardo Tropea (SET) - salvador AT inti DOT edu DOT ar
Work: INTI (National Institute of Industrial Technology) Sector: ICE 
(Electronic Control & Instrumentation)
Post (Home): Curapaligue 2124 - Caseros (1678)- Buenos Aires - Argentina