Dale,

Thanks for the post. This is an excellent question. The A400's LCD controller is pretty basic. Basically, all you can do is point it at a framebuffer and setup the correct timing for the glass. Because it is such a simple device and lacks any and all hardware acceleration features, the Windows CE display driver uses pure software emulation to do its drawing. In Windows CE terms, this is a purely GPE-derived display driver.

DirectDraw and DirectX have hooks into display drivers which allow them to take advantage of various hardware acceleration. However, if your hardware lacks these features, DD and DX will just default to using the software emulation libraries.

So, to answer your question, the LCDC _does_ support DirectX. However, it does so by invoking all of the Microsoft software drawing routines. Therefore, you may not see the world's greatest performance. However, this shouldn't prevent you from using DirectDraw for your rendering.

I hope that clears things up for you. Please feel free to post back with more questions.

Best regards,
--mikee

Since it is a GPE derivative, what about GAPI? From what I have read I believe GAPI works with GPE drivers since it only needs to get/set the address of the frame buffer. Perhaps this would be an alternative? I am not sure how get GAPI on the image though. It looks to be a PPC only kind of thing. Do you know of a way to get it on a CE image?

Thanks,

Dale

Dale,

We haven't played with GAPI here. I'm not sure what the specific requirements of it are. You could sure give it a try.

Just for everyone else's information:

GPE = Graphics Primitive Engine
GAPI = Game Application Programming Interface

Regards,
--mikee