🚀 go-pugleaf

<13781@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> cohen@cs.Buffalo.EDU (Alexander Cohen) writes:
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|I haven't heard much on the net about Apple's 32-bit Quickdraw init, I just
|recently dropped it in my system folder and was surprised not only at
|the ability for my paltry 256-color video board to display a 32-bit image
|dithered but the wonderful full color icon for the init!  This is without
|that patch called, I believe Color Finder.  Apparently the 32-Bit QuickDraw
|init allows the finder to directly display cicn's...pretty nice. Too bad it
|decreases available RAM by 120k, I'm already up to nearly a megabyte just
|for the system alone. ;-)
|
|	Anyone else notice this?  Is this still just beta-ware? Anyone
|now if there are any other advantages to this init?
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    32-Bit Quickdraw, as it's name implies, specifies an Apple-supported way
of using 16- and 32-bit video boards (24-bit video boards are really 32-bit
video boards which don't use the upper eight bits for display purposes).  But
along with this come other capabilities.

    The main capability of 32-Bit Quickdraw is the off-screen support it
provides.  In the black & white only days, it wasn't that hard to make an
off-screen bit map, but when Color Quickdraw and pixel maps came along, things
became a little more complicated because you had to set up the color table and
make sure everything works right at all available pixel depths.  None of this
is hard, but it's kind of a pain.  32-Bit Quickdraw will allow a developer to
create an off-screen pixel map at any pixel depth, or the pixel depth of the
deepest screen, using any color table--all in one call.

    It also supplies dithering of 16- and 32-bit per pixel images for displays
of lesser depth, and if you shrink a 32-bit per pixel image, 32-Bit Quickdraw
will do pixel averaging on the image so that it still looks pretty good.  This
also allows easy anti-aliasing.  Also, there is better support for color
palettes.

    The full-color icon is a hack, and I wouldn't worry about it.  The Finder
actually doesn't know how to display a full-color icon, but 32-Bit Quickdraw
patches Color Quickdraw so that if the Finder is about to draw 32-Bit
Quickdraw's usual black & white icon, the full-color icon is displayed
instead.  There's no way for any developers to do this with their own files.
I believe the Macintosh IIci's version of 32-Bit Quickdraw doesn't have this
"feature," and any new versions of 32-Bit Quickdraw that are released probably
won't have it either.

    32-Bit Quickdraw is not "beta-ware," in fact the version you have is 1.0
and is an official software release.  It is in its young stages though, so
1.0 and the IIci's version are definitely not the last word.


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|	-Alex Cohen                                 cohen@cs.buffalo.edu
|						    cohen@sunybcs.bitnet
+-----


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