Rasta 2: Return to Babylon

[John Walker <acad!throop!kelvin>]

Walking down the road with a pixel in your hand?

Don't Jamaica fool o' yourself trying to convert rendering files to 
raster bitmaps!

Rasta 2--a comprehensive update of Rasta, the portable C polygon
scan conversion package, is now complete and available.  Rasta was
originally introduced on July 14th, 1987 and has served as the basis
for numerous AutoShade display and hard copy drivers.  Rasta 2 is
the first update to Rasta and incorporates:

* Bug fixes to memory release and scan conversion of concave
  polygons with horizontal edges.
* Provision for setting single pixels with a "1 vertex polygon".
* Lint-free C code.
* Cleaned-up header file to reduce conflicts with definitions in
  calling programs.
* Cleaned up code for compiler compatibility.  Now compiles without
  warnings on both Turbo C 2.0 on DOS and Sun 3.4 C on Unix.
* A new MS-DOS demo program which uses Rasta to display AutoShade
  .rnd files on a VGA in 320x200x256 colour mode, complete with
  all source code for Turbo C.
* Cleaned up Unix demo programs for continuous colour and colour mapped
  rendering file to either PostScript or Utah RLE format output.
* Expanded, clarified documentation.

Rasta 2 should be transparently upward-compatible with all well-behaved
programs which use the original version of Rasta.

The complete distribution of Rasta 2 is available on Megalon in the
directory:

	~kelvin/releases/rasta

and its subdirectory rvga, which contains the VGA demo program.  The TeX
source code for the document is in the release directory as rasta2.tex.

A printed copy of the document will be distributed soon.  If you can't
wait, for a LIMITED TIME, BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL, the TeX source code and
the PostScript output are in ~uucp on Megalon as:

        acad!~uucp/rasta2.tex
and     acad!~uucp/rasta2.ps

The rasta2.ps file may be printed on any LaserWriter to which the
ArborText TeX prologue has been downloaded.

If any work you are doing involves converting polygons into a bitmaps,
Rasta may be just what you need.  It handles monochrome,
256 colour-mapped, and 24 bit per pixel continuous colour images, and
can adapt to almost any memory configuration, including limited address
spaces, expanded and extended memory, virtual memory systems, and
direct access to hardware frame buffers.