>> It's still the case that powerful audio and video hardware is far more
>> complicated to control than the comparatively primitive I/O hardware the
>> C64 provides. I bet it takes a few hundred POKE commands just to change
>> video mode, before you even *draw* anything...
>
> Actually it's just a single command in BASIC, something like
>
> MODE "X1920 Y1200 C16M"
>
> will do the trick. Of course if you want to iterate which modes are
> available then that's a few more lines. And it you want the memory
> address of the screen buffer, that's also one line. Then of course you
> can start writing directly to screen memory. So in 3 lines of BASIC you
> can change mode and poke a pixel directly to the screen - it doesn't get
> much simpler than that.

Yeah, that's not too bad, actually. You're not going to learn about 
low-level hardware access, but it sounds much easier than trying to get 
OpenGL to actually work.

>> I do remember when I first installed Debian on my Amiga 1200, I was
>> flabbergasted at how annihilatingly slow it was. Like, under AmigaOS the
>> system *easily* out-performs any 4GHz Pentium-IV system in terms of GUI
>> responsiveness. But under Debian running X11, it takes *twenty minutes*
>> for GNOME to load!! o_O
>
> Ditto here, obviously Windows/Debian is doing hugely more behind the
> scenes than older/simpler OS's, but still it's frustrating when you have
> an 8-core 4 GHz machine and it takes more than 100ms to open a window
> and display some icons. I assume Windows at least does a million
> registry reads for every file in a folder to look up actions, load icons
> etc, probably virus scan it blah blah blah.

The Amiga has various video hardware acceleration, all of which GNOME 
will be completely ignoring. Hence the slowness.

Also, I'm glad I'm not the only one who's seen Windows running slowly. 
Warp seems to think I'm from a parallel universe or something...

>> The hardware is still pretty complex to control. Writing a small
>> graphics library for this thing would be a major undertaking, not a
>> twenty-minute exercise like in the old days.
>
> I don't understand why it would be any different. You have a screen
> buffer in RAM that you can directly read and write to, or if you prefer
> the OS provides plenty of functions for drawing basic shapes.

I had assumed "you need an NDA" means that you can't find out where the 
framebuffer is.

>> By the way... I take it you've got one of these puppies then? ;-)
>
> Yes, for the price why not!

You make a compelling argument.

The device comes as a naked board, right? I wonder how easy it is to 
break it... Last I heard, devices like that don't like static discharge. 
(Great for something designed as an inexpensive toy for kids!)

I had a look, and you can buy a kit including one of these things from 

Post a reply to this message