On 11 Oct 02, at 10:07, Michael Weitzel wrote:
Fractint should now incorporate a driver for Microsoft's hardware abstraction 'DirectX'. This should obsolete all the built-in drivers (presently the VESA-driver is the only important driver. The other drivers belong to hardware that became 'hazardous waste' long ago).
I still think it better to turn Fractint into an open-source fractal generation engine (usable as a DLL) callable by a separate UI. This would free it from dependence on any particular OS. DirectX is useless except under Windows, and many of us are getting away from Windows (for many and varied reasons!), but implementing a way for Fractint to use DirectX (if possible from a DOS-mode prg) might be interesting. Although this reminds me of a time using Windows on an IBM PC750. The video hardware supported 1600x1200 (as did the monitor), but the Windows video drivers only supported 1024x768. Fractint's built-in video support was able to run at 1600x1200. If it had been solely dependent on DirectX, it would have been limited to what Windows supported.
I like the text-mode user interface. The DirectX driver would imho involve many changes :-( Perhaps a port to cygwin/mingw with ncurses/pdcurses and libSDL would be at least painful (XFractint already uses ncurses) !?
Actually, moving it to X windows would enable it to work under Windowss, assuming X support is available for Windows.
recently I found a driver called "VDMSound" (http://ntvdm.cjb.net/). It's a tool/DLL that emulates a complete Soundblaster-16/MPU401 ... just for playing old DOS games in Win2000/XP. And they are also planning a VESA-Emulation :-)
Hmm, the VESA emulation sounds interesting. I wonder how this would fit with Scitech Display Doctor's SNAP universal graphics driver architecture. David gnome@hawaii.rr.com