Message-ID: <3sgOvDALnJP2EwtM@talula.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 17:26:35 +0000
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com, allegro AT mail DOT canvaslink DOT com
From: Shawn Hargreaves <shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk>
Subject: FreeBE/AF 0.7 uploaded
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Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com

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