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First Successful Write to a Big-Endian Machine!!

I just had my first successful write to a big-endian
machine: a Sun Sparc 4. The Endianess detection is
working quite well, and I wrote some routines to swap
the bytes in the WORD, DWORD, BMFH, and BMIH
data types. Because these are the only data types that
span multiple bytes, they are the only parts of the library
affected by endianess.

Version 0.62 should provide experimental support for
big-endian architectures. This will include the PowerPC
architecture on OS X, for instance, and the Sun Sparc 4
on Solaris. (That's what I'm using for testing.)

In our first iteration, reading and writing support will be
the focus. After that, I'll start fanning through all the other
functions, particularly in
EasyBMP_VariousBMPutilities.h.

I plan to support all 32-bit and higher architectures very
soon. Since endianess has been (or will have been)
addressed, and the code is standard C++, I don't see
any reason to expect it to not work on other platforms,
such as BSD-like platforms (e.g., OSX) and Unix-like
platforms. So, I'm officially adding BSD/OSX as a
supported platform, as that is now my intention.

Thanks! -- Paul

Posted by Paul Macklin 2005-05-25

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