Re: [Mesa3d-users] PocketPC support

[Stephen J B. <sj...@li...>]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2002, William Gacquer wrote:

> Pretty funny, I also work on Volume rendering on PocketPCs!
> I am interested in any OpenGL and/or volume rendering stuff related to
> Pocket PCs.
> The fact about Mesa on PocketPC is not the basic operations of drawing
> in a buffer. The problem is that PocketPCs do not have a FPU. They are
> really slow at computing floating points.
> Did anyone work on fixed point implementation?

I've been doing some work on a 3D graphics API for this device:

  http://www.neomagic.com/product/7041.asp

...which is a pretty reasonable 3D accellerator (think "Voodoo-1"
in both speed and features) on the same chip as a MIPS CPU.
It already runs Linux incidentally.

This is also a case where there is no FPU.

I messed around a bit looking at using Mesa (or even writing
a small OpenGL subset from scratch).  However, I have come to
believe that when you want to do reasonable 3D on a device like
that, you need to design a new API from scratch that faces the
limitations of a slow CPU and no floating point.  That API can
be somewhat OpenGL-like in terms of how it looks - but things like
using fixed-point math are paramount and have to be designed in
from the start.

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