A new SDL back-end we've been toying with
Gavriel State
gav at transgaming.com
Mon Jan 28 21:56:06 CST 2002
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
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