RE: [Fwd: FW: Win32 XServer]

["Suhaib Siddiqi" <ssiddiqi at inspirepharm dot com>]

Kendall,
Thanks for participating and exchanging your experience.  Your
comments are well accepted.
I leave the aspect of devices drivers with John and Mike.  They
have volunteer to work on it. How they want to do it is totaly their
choice.  I am already gratefull to them for offering their expert
help
and efforts to make cygwin-xfree project a successfull.

Suhaib



> -----Original Message-----
> From: cygwin-xfree-owner@sourceware.cygnus.com
> [mailto:cygwin-xfree-owner@sourceware.cygnus.com]On
> Behalf Of Kendall
> Bennett
> Sent: Thursday, November 18, 1999 12:25 PM
> To: cygwin-xfree@sourceware.cygnus.com
> Subject: RE: [Fwd: FW: Win32 XServer]
>
>
> "Suhaib Siddiqi" <ssiddiqi@inspirepharm.com> wrote:
>
> > I noticed a lot of suggestions from Kendall.  My
> understanding is
> > John and Mike had been taking the same approaches.
>
> Sure, except for that fact that some people still seem
> bent on the
> idea of getting XF86_SVGA to program the hardware directly under
> Win32. Doing so will be a fruitless task due to the major
> compatbility issues that will ensue. The whole thrust of
> my posts has
> been to forget about doing that (at least for now), and
> get a good
> DirectX based server up and running.
>
> > I also do not accept the idea of GDI.  It is too slow
> and not good
> > for any X server.
>
> I tried to make this clear in my other posts, but I will
> re-iterate
> this again:
>
>  1. GDI *and* DirectDraw *can* be used at the same time for the
> primary surface under DirectX. Since the X-server will not be
> flipping this should be perfectly possible.
>
>  2. DirectDraw can be used for some stuff, but not everything is
> available. Specifically DirectDraw does not support hardware line
> drawing, hardware pattern fills or hardware text.
>
>  3. GDI can be used for those specific functions that can't be
> accelerated by DirectDraw, and those functions *will* use the
> hardware. Using the GDI line, pattern fill and text
> functions will
> blow away any software implementation (sure it won't be
> as fast as if
> you had native code from the XF86_SVGA server, but it
> will be faster
> than software).
>
> > As far as DirectX is concerned, I would rather leave
> this topic to
> > our exerts (John and Mike).  I am very confident they would do
> > excellent job.
>
> I am sure they will do a excellent job. However I resent the
> insinuation that I don't know what I am talking about
> when it comes
> to DirectX. I know what I am talking about because I had
> done all of
> the DirectX code in our SciTech MGL graphics library; the same
> library that was used to port Quake to Windows, and has
> been used in
> countless commercial games on the Windows platform.
>
> Perhaps actually *listening* to what I have to say would
> help you get
> to the ultimate goal of a working DirectX based X-sever in a more
> timely manner?
>
> > Without Cygwin it certainly would not have been possible to port
> > the code in xc/programs/Xserver/hw to Win32.
>
> Sure. But another thrust of my posts is that the code under that
> directory is not useful for the Win32 port anyway.
> Getting XF86_SVGA
> to compile is not a useful task, because getting it to work is
> fraught with major compatibility problems.
>
> I think you have already found that it simply won't work
> out of the
> box, given that you have already gotten it compiling and linking.
>
> Regards,
>
> +---------------------------------------------------------------+
> |   SciTech Software - Building Truly Plug'n'Play Software!     |
> +---------------------------------------------------------------+
> | Kendall Bennett          | Email: KendallB@scitechsoft.com    |
> | Director of Engineering  | Phone: (530) 894 8400              |
> | SciTech Software, Inc.   | Fax  : (530) 894 9069              |
> | 505 Wall Street          | ftp  : ftp.scitechsoft.com         |
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>