Thanks for the pointer! Now I'm curious how deep the connections (if any) between DRI, GEM, Atari, and PARC may have been...
- Stephen
-----Original Message----- From: squeak-dev-admin@lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:squeak-dev-admin@lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Andy Stoffel Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 11:08 AM To: squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: RE: [OT] GEM, Blitter, and Atari ST (was: RE: Debian and SqueakL revisited again)
I recently got an Atari ST emulator running on my laptop
and noticed
something curious...there was a menu option on the desktop called "Blitter" which IIRC sped up the graphics display. I wonder
if anyone
here knows if this has any relationship to BitBlt?
This feature is much newer than the programming related hardware/etc documentation I have (from 1986/87) on that machine but in the owners manual for MegaSTe (from 1990)
[ Ahh... for the days when an owner's manual had things like IO port pinouts.....]
it says:
"BLiTTER
The BLiTTER co-processor chip in the MEGA STe computer greatly improves the speed of text and graphic displays." [etc.]
There are Atari web sites you can search if you really want to know this stuff... and in fact, you can find information to answer your question here:
http://www.atari-st.lovely.net/atari-st-docs/hardware/BLITTER.TXT
which says, in part,
"The Atari ST Bit-Block Transfer Processor (BLiTTER) is a hardware imple- mentation of the bit-block transfer (BitBlt) algorithm. "
etc. including a reference to Smalltalk.
Hope this helps :-).
-Andy-