Johan Klockars a écrit :
No "application" should ever require full access (as in getting a pointer to the frame buffer) to the screen. Game developers might want it, but they should be made to understand that it is quite counter-productive on anything besides the standard Atari hardware (and perhaps SuperVidel, if/when that becomes available).
To continue on my example, the DirectX API on Windows allows this, in an official and documented way. The API describes precisely what features are available or not from the driver. It describe also the pixel formats, the line offsets... Every graphics card is different, but there are not so much pixel formats. They are regrouped into families.
So developers are happy.If they want to do low-level stuff for any reason, even if this can be slow, they can do it if the underlying driver allows it. So the developer has not to care about every graphics card, but about every family of features he wants to support.
If the VDI had allowed something like this, we may had seen more games using the VDI.
Oh, just for completeness, DirectX allows direct access to the frame buffer only in fullscreen, not windowed. This is another nice feature. The developer can say: now, the whole screen is mine ! and do what he wants on it, using any method.
-- Vincent Rivière