Re: My First Computer (was Computing Editorial)

[Andy McFadden <fadden@fadden.com>]

In comp.sys.apple2 Ross Simpson <yeah_whatever> wrote:
> Well that doesn't bother me a bit, it's just a matter of principle that some
> people can get away with talking about good programming using DirectX. Show
> me where I can download a different copy of DirectX for an entirely
> different CPU, Video Card etc.

The Xbox is pretty different, and uses DirectX.

If you mean to pick on multimedia abstractions and not just Microsoft
technologies, then you must also consider SDL, a Linux-originated library
that accomplishes the same thing.  Under Windows it's a thin layer over
DirectX, on other platforms it's much more.

You will also need to consider OpenGL, for which many games are written.
It runs on a very broad set of CPUs, video cards, and operating systems.

In many cases the DirectX library is simply used as a way to get a pointer
to the frame buffer with the right video modes enabled.  However, with
consumer expectations for resolution and bit depth of games increasing,
it's important to have some sort of generic access to hardware-accelerated
fills and blits.  You can write your software as tight as you want, but
it's not going to beat an implementation that doesn't have to send every
bit across the PCI/AGP bus (twice).

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