The wonderful thing about FORTH assemblers is that you have the full power of FORTH to write macros and code generation code with!
That particular assembler had structured control flow like if, while, etc.
It might have actually been a cgone, since the device name was /dev/cgone0. But the header file said cg2. Whatever it was, it was quite slow!
Years later, John Gilmore mentioned that he wrote that .h file with the C structures/unions that mapped out all the device registers.
I bought a copy of Aviator by Curt Priem and Bruce Factor, that ran on my SS2 pizzabox's GX "LEGO: Low End Graphics Option" SBus card (an 8 bit color
+ 2 bits monochrome overlay plane graphics accelerator):
>AVIATOR 1.5 FOR SUN NETWORKS OPENS UP GRAPHICS WORKSTATION GAMES MARKET. By CBR Staff Writer, 08 Jul 1991.
Not sure why the memory mapping was so weird -- but at least it wasn't as bizarre as the Apple ][! It did have some weird undocumented limitations, like you could only write to the colormap during vertical retrace (which I discovered the hard way -- it didn't seem to work for no apparent reason, except for the occasional times when it did kinda work).
Here's a reference to the cgone device that sounds about right:
* SUN120 A Sun Microsystems workstation, model Sun2/120 with
* a separate colorboard (/dev/cgone0) and the
* Sun optical mouse. Also works on some old Sun1s with
* the 'Sun2 brain transplant'.
Frame Buffer History Lesson
Last Updated: 24th November 1998
cg1/bw1: device name : "/dev/cgoneX" "/dev/bwoneX"
The color and monochrome framebuffer of sun100u.
It is not a crime not knowing anything about these. (and this was 7 years ago!)
That particular assembler had structured control flow like if, while, etc.
It might have actually been a cgone, since the device name was /dev/cgone0. But the header file said cg2. Whatever it was, it was quite slow!
Years later, John Gilmore mentioned that he wrote that .h file with the C structures/unions that mapped out all the device registers.
I bought a copy of Aviator by Curt Priem and Bruce Factor, that ran on my SS2 pizzabox's GX "LEGO: Low End Graphics Option" SBus card (an 8 bit color + 2 bits monochrome overlay plane graphics accelerator):
https://techmonitor.ai/techonology/aviator_15_for_sun_networ...
>AVIATOR 1.5 FOR SUN NETWORKS OPENS UP GRAPHICS WORKSTATION GAMES MARKET. By CBR Staff Writer, 08 Jul 1991.
Not sure why the memory mapping was so weird -- but at least it wasn't as bizarre as the Apple ][! It did have some weird undocumented limitations, like you could only write to the colormap during vertical retrace (which I discovered the hard way -- it didn't seem to work for no apparent reason, except for the occasional times when it did kinda work).
Here's a reference to the cgone device that sounds about right:
http://ftp.uni-bayreuth.de/Digital/alphaserver/archive/magic...
http://www.sunhelp.org/faq/FrameBufferHistory.html