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.