[OT] GEM, Blitter, and Atari ST (was: RE: Debian and SqueakL revisited again)

Stephen Pair spair at advantive.com
Thu Nov 1 16:29:30 UTC 2001


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 at lists.squeakfoundation.org 
> [mailto:squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On 
> Behalf Of Andy Stoffel
> Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 11:08 AM
> To: squeak-dev at 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-







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