FBlend v0.4 has been released!

What's new:

• Fixed a potential bug in the examples. Thanks to Vincent Penquerc'h for pointing it out!
• Fixes to the makefile's MMX and SSE tests.
• Removed SSE code in MMX blenders (left there by mistake)
• Added a 32bpp SSE, MMX and C add blender.
• Added a 32bpp SSE, MMX and C trans blender.
• Added a 16bpp SSE, MMX and C primitive add blender.
• Added a 15bpp SSE, MMX and C primitive add blender.
• Added a 32bpp SSE, MMX and C primitive add blender.
• Added a 16bpp SSE, MMX and C primitive trans blender.
• Added a 15bpp SSE, MMX and C primitive trans blender.
• Added a 32bpp SSE, MMX and C primitive trans blender.
• Added option to set depth of examples from a config file
• Added an MMX and SSE 2x stretcher. The C code falls back to Allegro.
• Added a DJGPP makefile
• Various bugs fixed.
• Makefiles now have an uninstall target.
• Makefiles are also more expressive as to the status of compilation.

Exams are over. This left me a little more time to finish up FBlend. If there aren't any show-stopper bugs, I'll make a release tomorrow.
In the mean time, you can grab the beta version and help with the debugging by going here.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Not much activity going on lately, since it's exam period. I still managed to get at least some work done :-)

Added lots of new things to FBlend (too many to list here). I also moved a large chunk of the code into macros, and optimized it a bit. I fixed some bugs int eh 15bpp add blender, which was showing images wrong.

It also appears George Foot made a few releases of AllegroGL while I was gone. We're at 0.0.24 now, with more DOS support, bugs fixed, and alpha blended text support.

FBlend: I've added 32bpp versions of the blender, and started writting the rectangle blender.

Sorry I haven't been updating in a while, I had to write a project for my Software Engineering course. The monster is 9000 lines of Java code and still growing :( The prof grossely underestimated the time it would take to complete it. We still have a week left though, so hopefully all the bugs will get kicked out. Here's a screenshot of it currently looks like:

Hey, it turns out I have some web space from school! I put Graviton there (take that 50megs.com!! bwahahahahaha!), and I think I'll move some more files there over time.

FBlend v0.2 has been released!
What's new:

• Added 15bpp supoprt do fblend_trans() and fblend_add()
• Optimized the common cases for both functions: 100% add and 50% trans.
• Changed API slightly.
• Made the trans function revert to masked_blit if factor is set to max.
• More speedups
• Trans code supports blocks of any widths
• Added Unix makefile
• Fixed some assembly code which broke under Unix.

Download your copy here.

I committed the 15bpp MMX ans SSE trans blenders to FBlend. Hopefully they will work (sorry, but I can't test those as my card doesn't support 15bpp). We're getting closer to v0.2...

Got some more work done on FBlend. 15 bpp add blenders were added, small speed ups all around the code, and major speedups for common cases such as 100% add and 50% transparency.

After months of waiting, Zasx is finally released!
Many changes since the beta version:

• Lots of bugs fixed
• Ben Davis's new sound track
• Full documentation
• Self-installing exe + Uninstaller
• New asteroid graphics by Jonathan Soulard

Added 15-bpp C code to FBlend, and also added optimizations for common cases.

Couple of bugs fixed in AllegroGL.

I also submitted my optimization article for Pixelate.

FBlend v0.1 has been released!
FBlend is a series of special routines that do color blending -fast-.
FBlend is also functionaly equivalent to Allegro's blenders, so you can just make slight changes in your code to benefit from the extra speed!
FBlend is up to 7.6 times faster than Allegro's 16-bit blenders!

I'm done converting D.U.M.B.'s floating point code to integer arithmitic. This gave a nice 30% speed boost. Next step is MMX resamplers.

Added a quadratic resampler to D.U.M.B., which uses 2/3 the CPU power of the cubic one and sounds just as good (to me at least :)

D.U.M.B.'s first release will be delayed slightly due to a rewrite of the samplers to use interger math instead of floating point (cause the x87 sucks).

Funny how Alias25 is strangely similar to Allegro isn't it? And speaking of plagiarism, this dude didn't even bother to make it unobvious that he stole the stuff from Angelo, including programs, games, and web page design; he even tried to sell them! - Lamer.

Here's a screenshot of the plug-in in works:

Back to the world of the living. I updated the optimizing article, which has appeared on issue 5 of Pixelate. I'm also mirroring Nathan Smith's Scriping Tutorial.

I just commited the almost done Winamp plug-in for D.U.M.B., which is almost fully functional now. I'll give out more details once we make a release.

Things have slowed down on SUUTB, which has been expected since school started. I hope it can be finished this year though.

Allegro 4.0 is nearing release. A tentative release date is December 10th (of this year, no I'm not kidding).

The site is painted black to mourn those who have died in the terrorist bombings in New York.

AllegroGL 0.0.18 has been released!
Lots of bugs were fixed from the earlier version. Check out the changelog.

I discovered a nice utility called TortoiseCVS, which is a very nice front-end for CVS under Windows. Here's a screenshot from my desktop showing it off :)

For the interested, I've started working on a Winamp plug-in for DUMB. Things are going slowly since I need to move stuff from Allegro.