A new SDL back-end we've been toying with

[Gavriel State]

David Elliott wrote:
> 
> On 2002.01.28 02:12 Gavriel State wrote:
> > There would be no appreciable differences.  As I said, this was mostly
> > something
> > we were just toying with.
> 
> Very interesting.  I was considering making an RFB (the VNC protocol)
> backend for Wine for about the same reason.  That is that the only really
> decent driver is X11 right now since ttydrv is fairly useless.
> 
> Hmm, maybe I should actually do that.  As an added bonus since VNC is just
> basically a generic framebuffer it would allow a fairly easy port to
> another generic framebuffer interface such as LinuxFB (or whatever the new
> hot-shit FB project for Linux is these days).

Well, the sdldrv is a long way from being capable of that kind of thing. 8-)

The big thing that's missing is a real GDI renderer.  It's great to have
something that can kind-of do a bitblt, but if you want to have windows
and menus and such on the screen, a real renderer is needed.  Aside from
BitBlit-ing, it would need to handle polygons, brushes, pens, clipping, 
and most painfully, text.  It's possible that some of Huw's recent work
might help there, but I'm not sure - I think that XRender actually requires
X...

Now, the interesting thing is this: Once we have a GDI renderer, we can
eliminate a *huge* amount of DIBSection cruft from the X11 driver.  Currently
Wine goes through astounding manipulations to get X to draw things for
us when we should be doing it ourselves.  This is very slow, and affects 
more apps than you might think (ie: WordPerfect).

We actually have a co-op student (Hi Jonathan!) who we've asked to look 
into this a bit.  He's quite new to Wine, and has some other duties 
as well, but I'm sure that he would be interested in sharing the work. 8-)

 -Gav

-- 
Gavriel State, CEO
TransGaming Technologies Inc.
http://www.transgaming.com
gav at transgaming.com