the new colour screen driver and the future of PROforma

At the show in Eindhoven in November 1997, Tony Tebby discussed his plans for the new screen driver which is supposed to replace the current driver. This driver is mostly known to people as it is supposed to support much more colours than is currently the case. However, the driver contains more important changes than that.

There is not too much I can say about this except that it looks very promising and will have support for colours and scalable fonts. The pointer interface will be completely embedded and it should provide a better framework for window managers. In essence this will mean that part of the work which is currently done by PROforma will be embedded in the screen driver (notable the bitmap drivers and its use will no longer be necessary, the other bits remain important).

It hardly has to be said that this will strongly impact the internal working of PROforma, and thus also ProWesS. Again, backward compatibility will be a major issue. Normally speaking the new screen driver should only improve capabilities and have no influence on existing programs - except that they suddenly support more colours.