[LispM-Hackers] Gfx macroops

[James A. Crippen]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, John Morrison wrote:

> Hi;
> 
> "James A. Crippen" wrote:
> > Here are the gfx macroops that I found upon cursory inspection of the
> > SSDN2.
> > 
> > %DRAW-CHAR font-array char-code x-bitpos y-bitpos alu-function sheet
> 
> Geez.  I don't have any justification for this but I would've thought
> the interface would've been lower-level (e.g., pixel ops).  Shows you
> what I know.  Based upon a whole 2 sleep-deprived minutes of thought, I
> am guessing that this is actually a really good thing.  I was worried
> the frame buffer emulation would be s-l-o-w.  I guess it won't be!
> 
> I guess the real trick will instead be trying to emulate that behavior
> on bare hardware some time in the future...

This is a matter of having some form of low-level display support and then
porting our fb library to it.  If we maintain a sufficient layer of
abstraction then it won't be terribly difficult.  I know that there are
some low level libs available that we could make use of to provide display
support on x86.  Squeak (a free Smalltalk system) has an example of this,
possibly we could take ideas from it when we get to the point of porting
to bare metal.

'james

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