Message-Id:	<199803302357.SAA25436@delorie.com>
Date:	Tue, 31 Mar 1998 00:23:14 +0100
To:	djgpp-announce AT delorie DOT com
From:	Shawn Hargreaves <Shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk>
Subject:	Announcing FreeBE/AF v0.1
MIME-Version:	1.0

I have uploaded a preliminary version of the FreeBE/AF graphics driver
project to http:/www.talula.demon.co.uk/freebe/.


What is FreeBE/AF?
------------------

   FreeBE/AF is an attempt to implement free VBE/AF drivers on as many 
   cards as possible. This idea came about on the Allegro mailing list, 
   due to the need for a dynamically loadable driver structure that 
   could support hardware acceleration. VBE/AF seemed to fit the bill, 
   and Allegro already had support for the SciTech drivers, so it seemed 
   like a good idea to adopt this format for ourselves. The primary goal 
   is to make these drivers work with Allegro, so the emphasis will be 
   on implementing the functions that Allegro actually uses, but we will 
   do our best to keep things in line with the official spec so that the 
   results may be used with any future VBE/AF applications as well.


What is VBE/AF?
---------------

   VBE/AF is a low level driver interface for accessing graphics 
   hardware. It provides all the same features as VESA, and adds the 
   ability to use 2D hardware acceleration in a portable manner. An /AF 
   driver is provided as a disk file (vbeaf.drv), and contains clean 32 
   bit machine code which can (with a few exceptions) be called directly 
   by a C program. If implemented correctly, these drivers have the 
   potential to be binary portable across multiple operating systems, so 
   the same driver file can be used from DOS, Windows, Linux, etc.


What can I do with this?
------------------------

   Currently not very much! There is only one driver: the stub. This is 
   not useful in any way, because it simply sits on top of your existing 
   VESA driver and emulates a few "hardware" drawing operations with 
   very slow software implementations. The stub is intended as a 
   starting point for people who want to make drivers for a specific 
   card: we need your help to support lots of different chipsets...

   Of course, you will also need a VBE/AF application to use with the 
   driver. This stub implementation has been tested with the SciTech 
   VBETEST program and the work-in-progress version of Allegro 
   (http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro/wip.html), and it works 
   correctly with both. You will need the WIP patch to use it with 
   Allegro, because VBE/AF support was not fully enabled in Allegro 3.0.


Credits
-------

   The DRVGEN utility is based on the djgpp DXEGEN system, by Charles 
   Sandmann and DJ Delorie.

   Linking and relocation system by Ove Kaaven.

   VBE/AF driver framework by Shawn Hargreaves.

   Hardware specific chipset support by <insert your name here> :-)



--
Shawn Hargreaves - shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/
"Pigs use it for a tambourine" - Frank Zappa

- Raw text -