DECimage questions

[Gary Grebus]

On 3/17/19 15:36, Chris Hanson wrote:
> I recently acquired a DECimage X terminal, which is theoretically a VXT-2000 with an add-on 2D accelerator. Unfortunately while the terminal is badges as a DECimage it didn?t include the board, just a frame buffer.
> 

You may not find any software that can actually use the DECimage board.

DEC's strategy for using X terminals for image display was based around
the X Imaging Extension (XIE).  That was an extension to the X protocol
that allowed an application to setup a rendering pipeline (decompress,
scale, filter, color adjust, etc) and then "transport" the image into
the pipeline.  If the X server had an accelerator, then the pipeline
might get mapped onto the accelerator hardware.  It was almost a win on
the underpowered VAX's of the day (especially for decompression).

So to take advantage of the accelerator, an application had to make
XIElib calls (analogous to Xlib).  The libraries (and XIE) were part of
the VMS and Ultrix products, but I'm not sure there was anything that
used them (maybe some example programs).

I don't remember if board for the VXT2000 had any other capabilities
that might have helped with normal X server operations.

  -- Gary