Peter Persson wrote:
The lack of a good low level API effectively shuts out games and demos completely, which is unfortunate. Accessing video memory directly is something that people want to do. We can either accept that and make a good solution for it - or ignore it - and people will do it anyway, and we'll just end up with lots and lots of compatibility issues.
This reminds me the DirectX API on Windows.M$ enabled the direct access to the video memory from user programs, even for video cards who don't support this, through MMU tricks. The pixel format depend on the actual hardware and mode, but it can be retrieved reliably (sounds familiar ?).
-- Vincent Rivière