Date:	Tue, 3 Dec 1996 16:49:59 +0800 (GMT)
From:	Orlando Andico <orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph>
To:	Leath Muller <leathm AT gbrmpa DOT gov DOT au>
cc:	"A. Kunigelis" <algikun AT santaka DOT sc-uni DOT ktu DOT lt>, djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: SVGALIB stuff
In-Reply-To:	<32A3850A.590@gbrmpa.gov.au>
Message-ID:	<Pine.SGI.3.93.961203164559.21151H-100000@gibson.eee.upd.edu.ph>
MIME-Version:	1.0

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? 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).

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..

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.

Is something wrong with my grand vision? (one thing I can think of is, it
will play hell with the virtual consoles!!!)

.-----------------------------------------------------------------.
| Orlando Andico                email: orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph |
| IRC Lab/EE Dept/UP Diliman   http://gibson.eee.upd.edu.ph/~orly |
|  "through adventure we are not adventuresome" -- 10000 Maniacs  |
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