Re: FreeType - A TrueType engine

[Johan Klockars <rand@cd.chalmers.se>]

> > I did that too about half a year ago to see if there would be any
> > problems integrating it with fVDI.
> 
> Could you send me your driver source?  I'm sure your's is better
> than mine.

Don't count on it. My code was only intended as a very quick test.  ;-)
Anyway, I'll try to locate it.

> On the other hand I've set up configure.in, config.guess and config.sub
> correctly so that future versions of FreeType will compile out
> of the box ("configure && make install") with MiNT/AES.

Nice.

> A propos displaying bitmaps on arbitrary screens...  While
> writing that driver I recognized one more time that I'm really
> far from being an expert in that area.  I've already seen that
> my driver will definitely crash on 24-bit graphics cards.

Doing a mono-expand blit from a monochrome buffer created by FreeType
should work in any graphics mode. The problems come when you want to
blit from a source with colours/greyscales.

I used to think (never tried it) that a vr_trn_fm() from a standard VDI
format MFDB would go via the VDI colour palette when the display is in
some kind of true colour mode (15/16/24/32). When I recently added that
function (only bitplane modes so far) to fVDI I noticed, however, that
the VDI seems to just combine the bitplanes into sixteen bit words with
no colour conversion. That would mean that you can't rely on vr_trn_fm()
to convert icons and such directly to true colour modes.
(It will be somewhat easier to implement, though ;-).

> Am I particularly stupid or are these things really particularly
> complicated on the Atari?  The next thing I need is the xpm

They certainly are compared to most modern hardware.

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