CompuServe Messages

Larry, The graphics/intuition libraries provides a whole bunch of functions to aid drawing things, such as pixels, lines, rectangles, circles, ellipses, arbitrary polygons, text, bitmaps, etc. There are even system calls to do animations, although I've not used them myself. Most of these do clipping, so you do not have to worry about going off the screen, although it is poss to disable the clipping to gain some speed. I suspect that PCs have clipping code in the app and that drawing off the screen is an unhealthy thing ? Of these operations, writing pixels is probably one of the slowest, whereas on the PC it is one of the fastest (largely due to the difference in the way PCs and Amigas store their bitmaps). As you move to larger objects, the pendulum swings the other way, as the Amigas bitplane architecture becomes more efficient, and the Amiga can farm the requests off to the graphics hardware. The multitasking nature of the machine means that the processor is free to be calculating the coords of the next object *while the previous one is still being drawn*. Of course, if the program calculates all the positions, *then* draws them all, it will take less advantage of this ability. Techies like argue incessantly over the difference between chunky (PC) arch, and bitmap (Amiga) architecture. They both have advantages depending on what you are trying to do. Steve the G. [BEDFORDSHIRE, UK]