23 Apr
2007
23 Apr
'07
5:43 a.m.
Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 22:55:55 +0100
From: Roger Holmes <roger.holmes at microspot.co.uk>
On 21 Apr, 2007, at 09:24, cctalk-request at
classiccmp.org wrote:
You are correct and I have that. But thank you, because I might not
have been aware of it. You had no way of knowing.
I also have "Guide to the Macintosh Family Hardware", and the Inside
Macintosh series. If I was an experienced video card designer, that
is all that I would need. They explain the interfaces, more or less.
But I would also like some materials that would teach me something
about the art. For example, there are a number of different ways
to handle updating the frame buffer so that one avoids artifacts on
the display. What are the pros and cons of each and how do they
apply in this particular situation?
I could try to build cards for each of them and test it out. But I
probably can't afford that many proto-types. On the other hand, I
might be able to get several designs out of one or two prototypes by
making good use of the flexibility of FPGAs.
Still, I'd love to read about some designs that worked and see what
choices other folks made.
Message: 23
Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 01:46:53 -0500
From: Jeff Walther <trag at io.com>
If any of your documentation is related to
hardware design as opposed
to user guides and user manuals I would be very grateful if I could
get a look at it.
You probably need 'Designing Cards and Drivers', part of the Inside
Macintosh series. One specific
thing I've been wondering about is how one implements
quickdraw acceleration. Was there an Apple guide to doing this in
some of the developer materials, or was it something which each
company worked out on their own -- deciding which Quickdraw calls to
trap and send to the video card?
Though I've never done it for hardware acceleration purposes, I would
think you just need to override some of the standard routines in the
QuickDraw bottleneck. StdLine, StdRect, StrRRect, StdOval, StdPoly,
StdBits, StdRegion and StdText. The ones you don't need are for
reading/writing pictures and picture comments. I have used these to
capture data for pen plotters, raster printers and into applications.
Alas on OS-X we now need to be able to read PDF - a much more
complicated format and proprietary to Adobe, though with the great
benefit of platform independence for files.