Blitters, anyone?
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Does there exist a graphics card or other hardware with on board blitter accessible through code? This harware would have to be installable on generic Pentium PC / MSWin 95, 98, 2K. Anyone mess with this stuff? BLITTER: BLock Image TransferER is a hardware chip providing boolean manipulation of bitmaps ('bitmap' in the generic sense, not MFC sense). Operations are normally combinations of shifts, AND, OR, NOT and possibly Zero Detect (was the result of a blit all zeros). Blitters normally allow more than 2 input bitplane operands and a result operand, cyclic operation (cycle through a block of operands performing same op on each set retreived), modular addressing (how to compute address of next operand), and masking. Can you tell that I was an Amiga freak? Tadeusz Westawic -- Dinosaur Some projects are born to fail, others achieve failure, and yet others have failure thrust upon them. origin unknown
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Does there exist a graphics card or other hardware with on board blitter accessible through code? This harware would have to be installable on generic Pentium PC / MSWin 95, 98, 2K. Anyone mess with this stuff? BLITTER: BLock Image TransferER is a hardware chip providing boolean manipulation of bitmaps ('bitmap' in the generic sense, not MFC sense). Operations are normally combinations of shifts, AND, OR, NOT and possibly Zero Detect (was the result of a blit all zeros). Blitters normally allow more than 2 input bitplane operands and a result operand, cyclic operation (cycle through a block of operands performing same op on each set retreived), modular addressing (how to compute address of next operand), and masking. Can you tell that I was an Amiga freak? Tadeusz Westawic -- Dinosaur Some projects are born to fail, others achieve failure, and yet others have failure thrust upon them. origin unknown
You can achieve the same results using various api's on Windows. On some newer cards a lot of the operations are hardware accelerated. Are you looking for something very specific?
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You can achieve the same results using various api's on Windows. On some newer cards a lot of the operations are hardware accelerated. Are you looking for something very specific?
I saw the "faster blits" demo article, and if I can't find hardware then I will do a software implementation. I guess I was surprised when I searched the web for 'blitter' and came-up with almost nil. So now my curiosity is aroused. While I am thoroughly familiar with C, I am a newbie at C++. By API I assume this is Application Programmer Interface? Where can I find them? Specifically, blitters run graphics engines using 'stacked bitplane' graphics (pixel graphics), can also be used to simulate cartesian n-space and therefore present an alternative to matrices and vectors and calculus for solid object modeling and other types of models. The Amiga platforms had an on-board blitter which I used specifically for modeling 3D solids. But my Amigas have died a slow death (8mHz and 16 mHz, poor things, abandoned under the house). Anyway, for small models, the MFC blits at the much faster pentium speeds will probably meet my needs. But more complex models involve stacked bitplanes where each "pixel" represents an accumulator and the blitter is coded to run the bitmap set as a parallel half-adder. So, you see why I explore for hardware first. :-) It's great fun!
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I saw the "faster blits" demo article, and if I can't find hardware then I will do a software implementation. I guess I was surprised when I searched the web for 'blitter' and came-up with almost nil. So now my curiosity is aroused. While I am thoroughly familiar with C, I am a newbie at C++. By API I assume this is Application Programmer Interface? Where can I find them? Specifically, blitters run graphics engines using 'stacked bitplane' graphics (pixel graphics), can also be used to simulate cartesian n-space and therefore present an alternative to matrices and vectors and calculus for solid object modeling and other types of models. The Amiga platforms had an on-board blitter which I used specifically for modeling 3D solids. But my Amigas have died a slow death (8mHz and 16 mHz, poor things, abandoned under the house). Anyway, for small models, the MFC blits at the much faster pentium speeds will probably meet my needs. But more complex models involve stacked bitplanes where each "pixel" represents an accumulator and the blitter is coded to run the bitmap set as a parallel half-adder. So, you see why I explore for hardware first. :-) It's great fun!
Gotcha. What you need is OpenGL. Your more expensive cards (3dabs) will do full OpenGL in hardware and the newer consumer cards (nVidia Geforce) will do most of the OpenGL in hardware. They have accumulation buffers, overlays, etc. etc. Pretty much all 3d modelling programs use OpenGL or HOOPS for their rendering. Is this what you're after? http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~arir/cda-abs.html P.S. instead of blitter try looking for rendering, scanline rendering, or rasterizer. I think there's some hardware which will do renderman in hardware. GScube maybe?
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Gotcha. What you need is OpenGL. Your more expensive cards (3dabs) will do full OpenGL in hardware and the newer consumer cards (nVidia Geforce) will do most of the OpenGL in hardware. They have accumulation buffers, overlays, etc. etc. Pretty much all 3d modelling programs use OpenGL or HOOPS for their rendering. Is this what you're after? http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~arir/cda-abs.html P.S. instead of blitter try looking for rendering, scanline rendering, or rasterizer. I think there's some hardware which will do renderman in hardware. GScube maybe?
You can also look at DirectX documentation (there is some here on CodeProject). DirectX has the benefit of having more features in it instead of 3D only. Now others will say that well there is an OpenNL for networking and a OpenXX for other things... well there might well be some good ones. Besides Tadzu never said that he was looking for 3D blitters. One problem that many people have faced with OpenGL in recent years if that the drivers for their cards do not have a full OpenGL driver. When video card drivers are created, OpenGL and DirectX drivers have a different way of doing things. For OpenGL, the card makers needs to implement all of the features and if the hardware does not support it then they have to code a software version of the feature themselves, while with DirectX, if you do not support a feature directly in the card hardware, then the driver can use Microsoft's software implementation of those features. Anyways no OpenGL/DirectX flamewar please.... I have seen good and bad programs that were implemented either way. I agree with Todd that you are looking for the wrong term. You can also look under BLT. Steve Maier, MCSD
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You can also look at DirectX documentation (there is some here on CodeProject). DirectX has the benefit of having more features in it instead of 3D only. Now others will say that well there is an OpenNL for networking and a OpenXX for other things... well there might well be some good ones. Besides Tadzu never said that he was looking for 3D blitters. One problem that many people have faced with OpenGL in recent years if that the drivers for their cards do not have a full OpenGL driver. When video card drivers are created, OpenGL and DirectX drivers have a different way of doing things. For OpenGL, the card makers needs to implement all of the features and if the hardware does not support it then they have to code a software version of the feature themselves, while with DirectX, if you do not support a feature directly in the card hardware, then the driver can use Microsoft's software implementation of those features. Anyways no OpenGL/DirectX flamewar please.... I have seen good and bad programs that were implemented either way. I agree with Todd that you are looking for the wrong term. You can also look under BLT. Steve Maier, MCSD
OpenGL is not restricted to 3D only... You can do 2D stuff as well, while having all the benefits an API like OpenGL/DirectX/whatever has. BTW, you said not to start an OpenGL/DirectX flamewar, but you have almost started it yourself, by mentioning OpenGL's "problems".
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Does there exist a graphics card or other hardware with on board blitter accessible through code? This harware would have to be installable on generic Pentium PC / MSWin 95, 98, 2K. Anyone mess with this stuff? BLITTER: BLock Image TransferER is a hardware chip providing boolean manipulation of bitmaps ('bitmap' in the generic sense, not MFC sense). Operations are normally combinations of shifts, AND, OR, NOT and possibly Zero Detect (was the result of a blit all zeros). Blitters normally allow more than 2 input bitplane operands and a result operand, cyclic operation (cycle through a block of operands performing same op on each set retreived), modular addressing (how to compute address of next operand), and masking. Can you tell that I was an Amiga freak? Tadeusz Westawic -- Dinosaur Some projects are born to fail, others achieve failure, and yet others have failure thrust upon them. origin unknown
No flamewars, please!! I have scanned what web and sdk stuff I could find and will go with DirectX. The DirectX docs are full of terms familiar to me (including 'blitter') and I understand 90% of the stuff on first reading (volume, not necessarily import). The OpenGL stuff I scanned was full of exciting things and the hw website credits of well-known games, etc was impressive. While I knew of the tems and processes described, I have never worked with them outside of coursework (and it has been a long time since then). I feel that I am choosing the right tool for the job and for the programmer. Thank you all for your input. Tadeusz Westawic Some projects are born to fail, others achieve failure, and yet others have failure thrust upon them. origin unknown