Re: how to add assembler?

[Jeff Read <bitwize@geocities.com>]

Pierre Phaneuf wrote:

> Assembler and direct buffers are both rather old-fashion nowadays. With
> hardware blitters, there is no way you can do better.

I suppose, if all you're doing is blitting simple images or sprites to
the screen. However, many 2D accelerators do not have support for things
like alpha-blending, scaling, rotation, shearing, distortion, lighting
effects. If you had a 3D card these could be accelerated, but as yet
there's no real elegant way to use a 3D accelerator's functions in a 2D
context, e.g., in a window or framebuffer. I know, for example, that
StarCraft and Jazz Jackrabbit 2 do not use hardware accel for much of
their graphics (which often involve translucency and/or lighting).-