blitter

In Amiga, you had the choice between using the CPU, the Copper or the Blitter for certain tasks, e.g.

Graphics wise it lacked hardware sprites, as well as support functionality equivalent to the copper and blitter.

So, there does need to be a test per sprite to detect that case and fall back on a more complicated blitter.

And it wasn't complicated to make things move using the Blitter and the Copper.

Getting the blitter performant enough to handle this was a blast, and it really shines at absurd speeds on high refresh rate displays.

Considering this guy is manipulating pixels directly and writing his own blitter, I believe he has the skills to pull it off.

But perhaps what would be a much better project would be the spirit of Amiga on an ARM system with a blitter and a copper chip.

Harder still when you don't have documentation about the specific I/O ports on the hardware and other things like the blitter chip.

You could just guess, but that would probably result in quite a lot of additional array shifting (lucky if you have a dedicated blitter chip for that:-)).

The Amiga hardware support for doing this kind of scrolling + the use of the blitter for moving game objects and replacing damaged sections made this method the obvious choice.

I'd really like to see something similar to this but for 2 or 3x the price (it's only $50) that includes a framebuffer, hdmi and a fully documented hardware blitter or bargain-basement GPU.

A few co-workers felt that this was less efficient than the old 2D APIs, where we would draw into a buffer that would be directly read by the blitter hardware, without having to do a load step.

Or you could make 1bpp "control" bitplanes that, when fed to the blitter, would fill your polygons scanline by scanline.

It's not the GUI per se -- I'd say that a classic smalltalk-80 system (or a pc set to boot into Pharo) would be way more "hackable" than even a standard GNU/Linux install (you can look at/change the whole window system, blitter etc while it is running).

Glenz vectors: use blitter to draw lines & blit into bitplanes with polygon filling mode, you'd need at least three bitplanes, one for the silhouette of the shape, one for the front-facing faces and one for the back-facing faces, then set up the palette so it's "just right" for the combination of planes to give a semi-transparent effect.

On Amiga, one had to use bitplanes which killed performance unless one could use the Blitter.