[qingcharles]

I had a CDTV and a CD32, but I never knew the details about CDXL format, thank you! I just checked and it looks like ffmpeg supports it, bless. It looks like the simplest possible video encoding format you could imagine.

Yes, the reason I was doing it like that on the PC was for the same reason you mention -- using polygons probably is faster because you cut out a lot of math and branches (as long as the polys are large enough) and just drop down to blitting huge swathes of solid color into the frame buffer.

[Scali]

On a PC it is different, because you need to render the polygons in software. On an Amiga you basically draw lines into each bitplane, and then do a single area fill at the end, all with the blitter. The area fill won't have to be stored, as this is done for each frame. Which means you only need to store the lines, and those can be stored directly as preprocessed register values for the blitter. So you can basically just stream the data directly from floppy and fire it off into the blitter.

But as I say, on early PCs you couldn't draw ANYTHING quickly into video memory. Which is also why for the 8088 MPH demo I developed a polygon renderer that calculated the differences with the previous frame, and then only drew that. This allowed a much higher framerate than clearing the stream and redrawing all polys. Similar to how the XDC encoder here encodes the differences.

On the Amiga the CPU isn't fast enough to draw entire screens either, but it has the chipset with the blitter, DMA transfers and whatnot to help it.