[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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