On Apr 21, 2007, at 2:46 AM, Jeff Walther wrote:
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?
Jeff Walther
Jeff,
Sorry, I missed this part. There was no Apple guide for quickdraw
acceleration. It was primarily frowned upon because a lot of times
you had to understand how quickdraw regions worked on a lower level.
When I designed Colorfusion (Xceed's LC-PDS video card) we used a
Weitek Video controller which had basic line drawing, rectangles, and
screen bliting. What we did was study quickdraw in the debugger (I
want to say the debugger was something like Mac Nosey? I could be
wrong though) and we found two or three places to hook into. The
hooks were decided on by the exact functions we could replicate.
Though you had to be careful because certain applications would
violate quickdraw rules. I want to say one of those applications was
Microsoft Word. I might have the source code for the acceleration
routines we used for Colorfusion. I'll have to look.
Rob
Rob Borsuk
email: rborsuk at
colourfull.com
Colourfull Creations
Web:
http://www.colourfull.com