Mail Archives: djgpp/1996/04/16/02:05:48
On 15 Apr 1996, Paul Derbyshire wrote:
> And their cross developed code on a unix box was going to make sound with
> what, and graphics with what? Even if Unix boxes typically had graphics
> and sound cards (I guess Linux boxes do anyways, but every "real" unix
> I've seen runs on little vt100 terminals connected to a big black box
> somewhere with flashing lights and disk drives...) wouldn't they be
> saddled with completely rewriting the graphics and sound routines to
> finally port it over to DOS? Lastly, the aforementioned graphics and sound
> routines probably comprise the bulk of their work!
>
I haven't seen the source (!! :) but the graphics in Quake was done in
assembly, with I surmise a common function-call interface to the
high-level portions of the code. Also, I think it's available for Sun,
NeXT (Doom was developed on this...) and Indy boxes, which are *not*
little vt100 terminals connected to a huge black box :)
Afaik, the cgsix0 card (the standard video card on Sparc10 and Sparc20
computers) uses a 1-Meg linear video memory buffer similar in spirit to
the 320x200 VGA mode, except the resolution is a lot higher! in fact, I
suppose it's easier to output to a cgsix0 than a VESA card with all those
VESA calls and stuff... not to mention since Quake uses TCP/IP for the
multiplayer stuff, it was a lot to Id's advantage to develop on Unix boxes.
Also (but I'm not expert at this) there is a way to define a window over
your root window (in X) to which you can output using direct memory
access instead of the relatively-slow X server calls. This is how they
did the Linux XDoom port.
That was a lot... :)
Cheers,
Orly
orly AT mozcom2 DOT mozcom DOT com
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