On 1/23/12 3:52 PM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> On 23.01.2012, at 08:38, Lawson English wrote:
>
>> On the topic of fillrates and software blitters, has anyone considered the use of QuickDraw regions to speed up the process? The patent expired long ago, but the algorithm was designed to allow overlapping windows to work on the original Mac, and was quite speedy. It was only superseded by specialized hardware many years later, but still has potential uses even though no-one bothers to.
>
> How would that compare to Morphic's clipped top-down drawing, which already is quite a bit more efficient than the usual bottom-up drawing?
>
> - Bert -
>
>
>
I don't know. QuickDraw regions are basically "sparse bitmps" that are 
defined by a clip rectangle + inversion points for the region inside the 
rectangle. If you perform a Boolean operation on two rectangles, what 
you get is a simple set of inversion points that indicates the start and 
end of the resulting irregular region, per scanline. I believe that 
simple vector graphics can be designed to make use of the info as well 
and in fact, you can make the interior of a line part of a region simply 
by drawing into one (if memory serves).

scanlines that are entirely obscured  are not included in the inversion 
list, only the start and end points of the lines that are partially 
obscured are listed, so it is quite space and time efficient for large, 
mostly rectangular areas, but pixel-exact for more complicated regions. 
A blitter designed to work with QD regions would simply stop (or start) 
copying for the pixels and scanlines that are defined by the inversion 
points. The resolution of QD regions was for bitmaps no more than 32,000 
pixels on a side (sufficient for any monitor or set of monitors 
available even today), but it seems plausible that it could be extended 
to 32bit-ish sized pixmaps, given the nature of how the inversion points 
are defined --this would double the memory used by the region, however.


boolean operations and a "point in region" operation were designed to be 
as efficient as possible and were responsible for the relative 
snappiness of early macs compared to PCs running windows.

  Apple stopped using QD regions when they went with PostScript-based 
graphics from NeXT, but there are still possible places where they might 
be useable. It is conceivable that a version of QD regions can be 
created to define 3D ROIs for medical imaging by extending the region 
definition to work with stacks of 2D regions in some way, but that's 
another thread.

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.05/05.06/ConvertPict2Rgn/index.html

http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/




Lawson