Sender: crough45 AT amc DOT de
Message-Id: <97Mar29.134747gmt+0100.16642@internet01.amc.de>
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 13:47:03 +0100
From: Chris Croughton <crough45 AT amc DOT de>
Mime-Version: 1.0
To: Shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk
Cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Allegro and EGA
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Shawn Hargreaves wrote:

> You should be able to use everything but the graphics routines without
> any trouble. Just don't call set_gfx_mode(), because it won't work :-)

Thanks - I've tried them and they seem to work (well, I don't have a
mouse or a MIDI device in this machine at the moment, but running
the demos for them didn't crash the machine so I guess they worked!).

Running a graphics demo (by accident) did 'interesting' things -
mainly it switched off the monitor!  Perhaps you could document
this as a useful feature (just kidding!)...

> Implementing EGA support would be very tricky. The current code assumes
> 8 bit, 256 color pixels. I'm currently in the middle of extending it to
> allow 16 and 32 bit truecolor pixels as well, but the EGA image format
> is totally different from both of these (16 colors, with interleaved
> bitplanes). It would require a complete rewrite of all the drawing
> routines, which would not be a trivial undertaking...

Ah, it's not a low-level driver thing.  OK, I'll forget it, I did some
EGA programming once a long time ago (like, before the VGA was even 
announced!) and I see the problem.  Sometime I'll get a VGA...

BTW, you said you want something in return - how about a complete set
of Linux man pages?  Or my latest core dump?  Nah, only kidding again,
I'll have a look and see if I can find something vaguely useful to
send you...

(Well, OK, the Linux man pages /could/ be useful...)

Chris