From: Bjorn De Meyer <bgdmeyer AT eduserv2 DOT rug DOT ac DOT be>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: FreeVBE ?
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 09:08:28 +0100
Organization: University of Ghent, Belgium
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Firts of all, thank you for the information.

On Thu, 26 Mar 1998, Shawn Hargreaves wrote:

[snip]
> 
> I think you will find it very hard to write a VESA driver with djgpp,
> because VESA is a 16 bit real mode API. You could perhaps do it with
> djasm, or the 16 bit gcc from DJ's site, but that would be making life
> extremely difficult for yourself. IMHO it would be much more sensible to
> find a real mode compiler like Borland C.
>
Well, I know of the existance of a freeware 16 bit C compiler called
MICRO-C or so, wich is used in the Freedos project. This would be the main
candidate then.

> But there is another possibility. I've recently been working on a VBE/AF
> driver for Allegro (preliminary version on my website), and this seems
> like something that would be much less complex to implement with djgpp.
> A VBE/AF driver is a disk file containing a block of relocatable 32 bit
> code, and it provides all the same features as VESA 3.0 plus support for
> a range of hardware accelerated drawing routines.

This sounds very interesting indeed. I might be interested to implement
the hardware specific stuff for me own cyrrus graphic card (Yea, I know 
^_^). 



> 
[snip]


> I have no idea how to implement this in djgpp: possibly some tweaking of
> the linker script, or perhaps by modifying the DXE code? (the two things
> seem very similar).
For your information, I ve heard rumors about something called the DXL
format. I heard it's more flexible than dxe. If anybody knows more about
it, please let it be known.

> 
> Does this seem like a useful or workable idea? I'm game for it if you
> are...
>
This is inded a highly interesting idea.

Bjorn De Meyer.
Homepage: http//studwww.rug.ac.be/~bgdmeyer
E-mail: bjorn DOT demeyer AT rug DOT ac DOT be 
Chemistry student at RUG, option polymers.
Coordinator of the "Tales of Artah: First Sword" CRPG project.         
         
                Beyond everything, there is nothing...