Re: Why no Mosaic for Apple IIgs?

[eaiu636@rigel.oac.uci.edu (Leif Strand)]

In article <bazyarD4s1HE.7o@netcom.com>,
Jawaid Bazyar <bazyar@netcom.com> wrote:
>  Ah well. In any event, Ian's comments about the 1MHz architecture
>of the Apple II do not apply to Second Sight's on-board 20MHz
>processor - the graphics routines for something like Mosaic would
>all run _on the card's_ processor anyway, fonts would be loaded into
>the Second Sight's voluminous video memory, and transfered to 
>display memory at very high speed indeed.
>
>  Mosaic is a pretty complex application, to be sure, but with Second
>Sight and a QuickDraw patch it's certainly doable, and doable well.
>Let's see what the future holds in store!

I've thought that you'd want to do this -- that is, a QuickDraw II patch
for Second Sight -- in general (not just on an application-by-application
basis).

Obviously you wouldn't be able to take advantage of Second Sight's high
resolution modes, because QuickDraw II applications make assumptions about
screen depth and pixel aspect ratio (the bad ones even make assumptions
about screen size).  But well-behaved QDII applications don't access the
video memory directly -- so  while the hardware kludge of copying the GS
video memory to the Second Sight 30 times a second (or whatever) will work
in general, with QD-based desktop applications you have an enormous
opportunity to increase speed, if not resolution.

So, imagine if you had a Second Sight QD "driver" which patches the QDProcs
routines for the default port (the screen), much like a laserwriter driver
does in the port used for printing.  You would implement the low-level
QuickDraw routines on the Second Sight board itself, so they would run
really fast.  And like you said, you could put fonts in the video memory
too.  You'd have to be careful to handle the exceptions, like icon drawing,
which I don't believe goes through the QDProcs architecture.  Think of how
fast the Finder or AWGS would be with Second Sight under this arrangement!
QD running at 20MHz on-board, with Shaston on-board too... the Second Sight
board would become like an X11 server, in a way.

I guess people like me, with unaccelerated GS's, like to dream about such
things...

--Leif Strand