Date: Tue, 16 Apr 1996 14:03:00 +0800 (GMT+0800) From: Old System Diagnostic To: Paul Derbyshire cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: QUAKE and DJGPPy In-Reply-To: <4kscau$8uq@freenet-news.carleton.ca> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII 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