That said, is anyone else boggled by the technology choices here?
Assembler + DirectX/Input/Sound seems to be like yoking a cheetah to a
covered wagon.
Actually DirectX is about as fast as it gets under windows; on 95/98/ME in
fullscreen mode you can lock the frame buffer and write directly to video
ram on the display hardware.. under XP it might not allow this directly,
I'm not sure as I haven't written for DirectDraw under XP.
In any case running in a window necessitates a copy from an off-screen buffer
to video ram, but most modern hardware is capable of performing a hardware-
accelerated stretch-blt as part of this operation making this very fast.
All of this is a moot point however since the SoftVCS page points out that
the current implementation is using the GDI, and I know from experience
that GDI's StretchBlt is *very slow* under XP and probably all other
versions; it doesn't seem to use hardware acceleration at all.
That said, it looks really good so far, and it even runs shadow keep..
with a few glitches here and there (I couldn't resist trying it ;)
I'd be very interested to see the source when you release it :)
Regards,
Andrew.
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