GCOL and GLES

An aside from the BB4W IO group:

https://groups.io/g/bb4w/topic/the_future_of_gcol/76704409?p=,,,20,0,0,0::recentpostdate%2Fsticky,,,20,2,0,76704409

As ARM and Nvidia are now linked, now might be a good time to review if VDU, GCOL, PLOT etc and the associated SWI’s would need to be udpated ( a possibly breaking change) to support more recent graphics hardware in future releases.

OpenGL/ GLES can presumably be accessed from BASIC via appropriate SYS commands ( BBC BASIC for SDL/WASM provides a library interface that could for example be ported, by someone more competent than I am.)

Alexander Farlie.

As ARM and Nvidia are now linked, now might be a good time to review if VDU, GCOL, PLOT etc and the associated SWI’s would need to be udpated ( a possibly breaking change) to support more recent graphics hardware in future releases.

Since RISC OS’s VDU driver only requires a basic linear-addressed bitmap framebuffer, the only thing that’s likely to cause problems would be if new hardware uses a very different set of pixel formats to what RISC OS currently supports.

OpenGL/ GLES can presumably be accessed from BASIC via appropriate SYS commands ( BBC BASIC for SDL/WASM provides a library interface that could for example be ported, by someone more competent than I am.)

nouveau seems to have come along way in recent years (including supporting some of the GPU cores used in nVidia’s Tegra SoCs), so perhaps that’s not too far-fetched.

A sensible starting point would probably be to have a go at getting the driver working on a Titanium (perhaps with the help of an adapter/extender, or a hacksaw, to allow a typical 16x lane card to be used)

By the time we see any chips coming from a combined ARM + nVidia, they are likely to be 64 bit only, and that’s going to be a bit more of an issue than anything to do with graphics.

Reading the page above about GCOL, it’s only going to be the legacy < 8bpp graphics mode making use of this, I would expect they would be software rendered to a frame buffer and then passed to the video API, rather than attempting to reproduce BBC style plotting in OpenGL/GLES.