Message-Id: <199803302357.SAA25436@delorie.com> Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 00:23:14 +0100 To: djgpp-announce AT delorie DOT com From: Shawn Hargreaves Subject: Announcing FreeBE/AF v0.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Precedence: bulk Precedence: bulk I have uploaded a preliminary version of the FreeBE/AF graphics driver project to http:/www.talula.demon.co.uk/freebe/. What is FreeBE/AF? ------------------ FreeBE/AF is an attempt to implement free VBE/AF drivers on as many cards as possible. This idea came about on the Allegro mailing list, due to the need for a dynamically loadable driver structure that could support hardware acceleration. VBE/AF seemed to fit the bill, and Allegro already had support for the SciTech drivers, so it seemed like a good idea to adopt this format for ourselves. The primary goal is to make these drivers work with Allegro, so the emphasis will be on implementing the functions that Allegro actually uses, but we will do our best to keep things in line with the official spec so that the results may be used with any future VBE/AF applications as well. What is VBE/AF? --------------- VBE/AF is a low level driver interface for accessing graphics hardware. It provides all the same features as VESA, and adds the ability to use 2D hardware acceleration in a portable manner. An /AF driver is provided as a disk file (vbeaf.drv), and contains clean 32 bit machine code which can (with a few exceptions) be called directly by a C program. If implemented correctly, these drivers have the potential to be binary portable across multiple operating systems, so the same driver file can be used from DOS, Windows, Linux, etc. What can I do with this? ------------------------ Currently not very much! There is only one driver: the stub. This is not useful in any way, because it simply sits on top of your existing VESA driver and emulates a few "hardware" drawing operations with very slow software implementations. The stub is intended as a starting point for people who want to make drivers for a specific card: we need your help to support lots of different chipsets... Of course, you will also need a VBE/AF application to use with the driver. This stub implementation has been tested with the SciTech VBETEST program and the work-in-progress version of Allegro (http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro/wip.html), and it works correctly with both. You will need the WIP patch to use it with Allegro, because VBE/AF support was not fully enabled in Allegro 3.0. Credits ------- The DRVGEN utility is based on the djgpp DXEGEN system, by Charles Sandmann and DJ Delorie. Linking and relocation system by Ove Kaaven. VBE/AF driver framework by Shawn Hargreaves. Hardware specific chipset support by :-) -- Shawn Hargreaves - shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/ "Pigs use it for a tambourine" - Frank Zappa