Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!peregrine!elroy!ames!ncar!oddjob!uxc!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!urbsdc!aglew
From: aglew@urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Blitters and design philosophy
Message-ID: <28200187@urbsdc>
Date: 9 Aug 88 13:55:00 GMT
References: <62659@<1988Aug1>
Lines: 24
Nf-ID: #R:<1988Aug1:62659:urbsdc:28200187:000:1298
Nf-From: urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM!aglew    Aug  9 08:55:00 1988


>>I have always doubted the value of special purpose hardware, though 
>>I have been responsible for some real doozies myself. In the vast 
>>majority of cases, general is better. A recent example from my own
>>experience: a frient wanted to port a TeX screen previewer I had 
>>written for the  (very general-purpose) IBM-PC to his whizz-bang
>>super-dooper graphics Iris 4.
>
>Of course, a better way to do this would be to translate the required TeX
>fonts to the Iris format and simply print them on the screen, using the
>Iris special purpose hardware instead of fighting it.  Of course, this would
>require rewriting the TeX screen previewer from your (small-memory addressing,
>small file space capability, severely limited processing power, no hardware
>display scaling or clipping, etc) IBM-PC for the whizz-bang super-dooper
>(optimized for real time animation) Iris.

So, a working program, with acceptable performance on an already existing
processor, has to be completely reworked in order to even barely run on
a "high performance" graphics system?

This, of course, doesn't even consider that it may be impossible to get
TeX semantics using an existing font generator on the Iris - in the same
way that most troff output to Postscript printers positions each character
individually.