Ryan,

> I am using Squeak 2.6 on the Win32 VM on Windows 98 on a 
> P2-266 with an ImageAccel 2 card on a 20" 256-grayscale monitor. 

What's an ImageAccel 2 card?! Never heard of it - who's the manufacturer?!

> The card can only operate in one of two modes: 640x480 or 1600x1280. 
> Rendering speed in Squeak is an order of magnitude slower 
> than rendering speeds in any Windows applications, and 
> makes it pretty much unusable for me.

Squeak's display speed depends heavily on the quality of the drivers for
your graphics card. In particular it depends on how efficient bitmap copy
operations are implemented. *Usually*, modern graphics cards implement 2D
hardware accelleration for bitmaps and if so, Squeak should be reasonably
fast. My best guess is that you've got relatively poor drivers for your card
(Windows falls back onto simulation code if the operation is not directly
supported by the driver).

> I like the way Squeak looks in grayscale, and having all the extra 
> working space, but I can't make it behave at a reasonable speed.  
> I tried reduce colour bit depth to 8, 4, or 1, but this didn't 
> improve behaviour that much. 
> 
> Are there newer additions to the BitBlt code for Squeak that 
> would improve this? 

I do not think that BitBlt speed is related to this. I've been running
Squeak for quite some time on a 200Mhz PPro system with an ATI graphics card
and the display speed was perfectly reasonable.

> Any support for hardware graphics acceleration?

No ... not yet. I'm working on this but it'll take some more time. I'm
hoping to release some stuff after 2.7 is out but somehow I doubt that it'll
help you, since it will rely on exactly the same things that should be
accellerated already. Although it'll make things quite a bit faster
(hopefully) the core question is still how good is the graphics card at
copying pixels efficiently.

  Andreas