viddev vs. rastop

[Gil Kloepfer Jr.]

In article <2167 at rtech.UUCP> daveb at llama.UUCP (Dave Brower) writes:
|>In article <4447 at killer.UUCP> loci at killer.UUCP (loci!clb) writes:
|>>	Another program, an animation routine was submitted by Sid Grange
|>>	(sid at chinet) which uses raster op's. Fiddling with it a bit
|>>	(removing the delay loop), I was able to get it to write at
|>>	300 frames per second. That seems pretty fast to me, so I'm
|>>	wondering why rastop's wouldn't be prefered.
|>
|>Rastops only work inside a window.  If you want to write elsewhere on
|>the  screen, you are in trouble.  Say, for example, you wanted a
|>different window manager...
|>
|>-dB
|>{amdahl, cpsc6a, mtxinu, sun, hoptoad}!rtech!daveb daveb at rtech.uucp

This has nothing to do with window management.  If you want a new window
manager, all you have to do is kill the current one and write your own.  You
open a window icon in the corner of the display (a separate window), and you
can do just what the current window manager does now (see the window driver
manual pages).  I think what you mean is to write a new window DRIVER.  To
that, I say, "Good luck!" :-)

If the question posed is what the use of Mike Ditto's routines were as opposed
to just using rastop -- Mike answered this question when he posted the driver
routines.  They were meant to be educational more than operational (even
though they were both).  It is also kind of neat to be able to have this kind
of low-level control of the screen memory like you could have on the Commodore
and Atari low-end 6502-based PC's.  I think Mike even said in his README
file that his driver was not something he recommended using -- not only
because it bypasses the window driver and can do wierd things to the display,
but because using rastop is supposed to allow some kind of upward compatibility
should the hardware change or some such thing...and because it and the window
manager work together.  (hardware changes, ha ha :-)

Hope this is somewhat informative.

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