libzbtfb / News: Recent posts

I was writing a game for libzbtfb when I discovered that I'd totally screwed up fb_draw_{horiz,vert}_line() in 0.1-6. If you value all things rectangular, the whole two of you who downloaded 0.1-6 should upgrade to 0.1-7.

I'm sorry. My library sucks. Please don't hurt me! :P

I've had these fixes sitting around in my home directory for awhile. Months, really. The most notable fix is that 8bpp doesn't segfault anymore, and that it's now possible to build without C++. It also builds a static library now.

I was planning on BMP save support, but haven't gotten enough round tuits. GIF still doesn't work. I've laid "ground work" for porting to other OSes (simply by mimicking Linux fb structs), but nothing yet.

libzbtfb has been dormant lately. The project started when I couldn't use X on my hardware. I've been using X again lately. I have little reason to hack on a framebuffer library.

In the near future, though, I'll be doing development on an underpowered OpenBSD box which will not use X. I'm entirely unfamiliar with any video interfaces present in OpenBSD, but you can count on me looking into them.... read more

Well it's about damn time, eh?

This fixes the silly Makefile bugs, and among other things, adds bitmap loaders for XPM and BMP. ('man zbtfb_formats' for more info.) libgif support did not yet make it.

If performance seems poor at 8bpp, let me know.

I've known about this for a very very long time (the night that 0.1-4 was uploaded, in fact), but I didn't think anyone cared about the library, so I didn't say anything about it.

The bug has to do with $(PREFIX) and my carelessness restructuring Makefiles. So if you're building it, and you want a "make install", you're going to have to manually set the variable:

# make install PREFIX=/usr/local... read more

A new version uploaded - this adds a lot of nice things, from reference counting to code cleanups to a C++ object wrapper.

The basis for a framebuffer-shell-scripting kit is there too. But bare with me, because I'm still working on that.

For awhile last year, I'd wanted to work with the framebuffer. I don't think I had a particular reason, but then, that's how most of my pet projects, and indeed my interests in general, get started anyway.

So I looked at the kernel header, and for awhile asked myself, "What the hell am I to do with this?" But one weekend in early September, I set out to write a framebuffer library.

So I wrote line code and box code and circles and arcs, and more and more and more. It was a wonderful learning experience. That library grew into "libzbtfb", which yes, has a name meant to be nonsensical.... read more