lol... okay now my cover is blown. ;-)
Yes its true I am the author of Mildred, the chunky-mode graphics library for Blitz Basic on the Amiga.
How you exactly came to realize this I'm not so sure :-\
For those who don't know what we're all talking about, Mildred was a graphics library module that I coded in assembler for the original Blitz Basic on the Amiga. It was designed to replace the default graphics system of planar rendering using the blitter which was proving to be slow once faster CPU's were coming out. It could do pretty much everything that Blitz itself could do, only in uninhibited fast-ram using the CPU. And then some. :-D So it was a nice leap in performance for people with higher-end (at the time) CPU's with fastram. It proved to be very popular all round and I never really heard anyone complain about it which is nice. :-)
Actually Max2D in BlitzMax at the moment reminds me a lot of Mildred and what I wanted it to do - wanted to have rotation but I didn't quite get to that, mainly because the rotation routine seemed to need too many registers in the CPU to be fast enough and there weren't enough. But otherwise with all the blend modes and so on it's pretty similar - although I think Mildred had a few other features like particles, de-res zooming, and distinguished between sprites and bitmaps. I'm sure there will be interesting updates to the 2D capabilities of BlitzMax in future. It's not something I'm planning to do at the moment because it's already pretty capable and I'm still getting used to it.
Hat's off to Mark and co for creating a great product!
Yes its true I am the author of Mildred, the chunky-mode graphics library for Blitz Basic on the Amiga.
How you exactly came to realize this I'm not so sure :-\
For those who don't know what we're all talking about, Mildred was a graphics library module that I coded in assembler for the original Blitz Basic on the Amiga. It was designed to replace the default graphics system of planar rendering using the blitter which was proving to be slow once faster CPU's were coming out. It could do pretty much everything that Blitz itself could do, only in uninhibited fast-ram using the CPU. And then some. :-D So it was a nice leap in performance for people with higher-end (at the time) CPU's with fastram. It proved to be very popular all round and I never really heard anyone complain about it which is nice. :-)
Actually Max2D in BlitzMax at the moment reminds me a lot of Mildred and what I wanted it to do - wanted to have rotation but I didn't quite get to that, mainly because the rotation routine seemed to need too many registers in the CPU to be fast enough and there weren't enough. But otherwise with all the blend modes and so on it's pretty similar - although I think Mildred had a few other features like particles, de-res zooming, and distinguished between sprites and bitmaps. I'm sure there will be interesting updates to the 2D capabilities of BlitzMax in future. It's not something I'm planning to do at the moment because it's already pretty capable and I'm still getting used to it.
Hat's off to Mark and co for creating a great product!