Re: [AD] New graphics driver -- GFX_FORCE?

[Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz <gradha@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, Laurence Withers wrote:
> :-) The Allegro utilities and test program do this, but I wouldn't
> expect other things to. Although the GFX_FORCE driver does support
> setting a different color mode to what is passed as a parameter, it
> doesn't provide any sort of emulation, so there would be a note in the
> documents saying that you should only really use this for 15/16 or 24/32
> bpp issues.

I am rather against this because if the program takes the hassle of
checking such similar color depths, it's really trivial to make it work
correctly with other color depths too.

Again, this is a problem I reached when working on the GFX_SAFE driver,
and decided that although all examples could be made to work on any
resolution, it's not really ideal because they would need more complicated
code, which isn't nice in examples aimed at newbies. 

Also, it's potentially risky: users running such examples getting wrong
colors or whatever would immediately think Allegro is broken and delete
it.

> On my laptop, all of the allegro examples handle having a forced
> resolution gratefully; for instance, ex12bit displays itself in a
> 640x480 window in the top left of an 800x600 screen.

Well, maybe you could do the following: let GFX_AUTODETECT use GFX_FORCE
as a last resort, or the first driver to be tried if a .cfg file is found.
Then make the GFX_FORCE driver work like the normal X driver, which
emulates screen and makes color conversions as needed through a double
buffer, IIRC.

Anyway, the good thing should be to use GFX_SAFE :)

 Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz   gradha@xxxxxxxxxx - http://gradha.infierno.org
 Other web pages:  http://glub.ehu.es/  -  http://welcome.to/gogosoftware/