Subject: Re: More on rcons performance woes: pmax profiling
To: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU>
From: Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 03/02/1999 20:49:24
> That leaves me wondering what the impact of `wscons' will be on
> workstation hardware whcih doesnt have a hardware `text mode'.  Maybe
> we'd be better off keeping a char-cell image of the display and
> updating it by repainting rather than blitting. But for displays with
> blit hardware, supporting that hardware and using it in the
> graphics-console code could be faster yet.

If we have to support a large population of software-blit machines then I
strongly agree with this approach. It was used extensively in the latter
days of the Apple II because it did a great job of exploiting accelerator
boards with caches and write buffers, but slow video memory.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com