I've ported Squeak 2.3 to Amiga, more or less

[Bert Freudenberg]

Am 04.06.2006 um 19:36 schrieb tim Rowledge:

> On 4-Jun-06, at 8:53 AM, Tim Johnson wrote:
>
>> On May 30, 2006, at 5:02 AM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> [snip]
>>>
>>> Oh I guess every VM hacker has seen this :) You might just copy  
>>> the bit depth conversion routines from another VM.
>>
>> Yes.  I am working on this.  I think the main issue is Squeak's  
>> PixMaps / BitMaps being little-endian, and the Amiga being big- 
>> endian.  I am looking at the UNIX-VM source for tips (I found a  
>> function there for 8-bit depth to 8-bit depth blits).  What's  
>> strange is the Squeak 2.3 VM seems to not use ioHasDisplayDepth(),  
>> so if I want to implement 16-bit/32-bit display depths on my Amiga  
>> VM I might have to move up to 2.4+...
>
> Ah, Squeak bitmaps are BIG endian, not little. The first  
> implementation was 68k mac based and the PPC. Us little endian guys  
> (ARM, x86 etc) had all sorts of fun developing efficient Squeak  
> 'Display' to actual glass transfer routines. You would most likely  
> benefit most from looking at the Mac code for this stuff. You might  
> need to convert the *pixel* format though since not every platform  
> is RGB. RISC OS is little-endian BGR for example, some thing that  
> took a lot of attention to resolve in the early days of Squeak.

Note, though, that the recent bitblt code can deal with both, little  
*and* big endian RGB. While big endian is standard, little endian is  
indicated by negative depth values. However, I guess a 2.3 image  
might not have the in-image support for negative bit depths, yet, and  
also, it might not call the hasDisplayDepth primitive. Implementing  
bit shuffling for big endian still is the most compatible way.

- Bert -