OF INTEREST

At this year's Computer Game Developers Conference, Microsoft announced the Windows 95 Game SDK. Developers attending the announcement received a free beta copy of the SDK along with a beta release of Windows 95. The company hopes to gain the mindshare of game developers who have traditionally targeted DOS for their apps. Microsoft concedes that over 90 percent of the games currently on the market and in development run under DOS. Windows 3.1's sluggish display performance has been a sore point with games programmers and has been a primary reason for its slow acceptance in the game industry. The company hopes that the new features of Windows 95 along with improvements provided through the Game SDK will change that.

The SDK includes a Windows 95 game subsystem to enable high-performance game play. The game subsystem, a new component of Windows 95, will eventually be included in a future release of the operating system. In the interim, developers can use the game subsystem on a royalty-free basis to create games and will have permission to redistribute the run time with their software.

The SDK also features four C APIs: DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectPlay, and DirectInput. DirectDraw supports Blt, transparent Blt, and page flipping through hardware acceleration. On a 486/66, Blts can be moved at rates up to 70 frames per second at 640x480 pixels using 256 colors. DirectSound allows mixing and playback of up to eight audio streams with full volume, frequency, and pan control over individual streams. Latency on playback has been cut from the roughly 200 milliseconds it takes for current WAV drivers to approximately 50 milliseconds. The DirectPlay API allows multiplayer games to connect either through Winsock or modem. DirectPlay provides the functionality to open a connection, create a player, and send messages between players. This is accomplished using a "send- receive-reply" model. DirectInput supports digital joysticks using a mini-driver model; drivers will be supplied by individual vendors.

In a related announcement, Microsoft detailed plans to include the Reality Lab real-time 3-D engine in future versions of Windows. Microsoft obtained the product through its acquisition of RenderMorphics in February of this year. Reality Lab, an API for creating and rendering 3-D graphics in real time, already takes advantage of hardware acceleration at any stage of the graphics pipeline. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, "the 3-D engine will also benefit from hardware acceleration features of DirectDraw." Microsoft plans to release a beta version of Reality Lab in early 1996. Questions regarding Reality Lab can be sent to reality3@microsoft.com.

One Microsoft Way

Redmond, WA 98052-6399

Metagraphics has released Media!Lab, a graphics-programming toolkit for developing Windows-based, interactive graphic and multimedia programs. Media!Lab supports imaging, special effects, animation, video, and sound in a C++ programming environment. The library, which is in optimized assembly language, integrates with Windows enhanced multimedia and WinG facilities and can be used alone or in conjunction with class libraries such as MFC or OWL.

Media!Lab supports BMP, PCX, and DCX image files; AVI, FLC, and FLI video; sprite animation; sound; timer controls; fade and wipe effects; color-palette animation; object hit and collision detection; bitmap tiling; and the like. The class library, which works with Visual C++ and Borland C++ compilers, sells for $349.00.

200 Clock Tower Place, Suite 201E

Carmel, CA 93923

3Dlabs has announced its GLINT 3D graphics-accelerator chip, which supports VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) 3-D graphics and virtual-reality applications available on the World Wide Web. Silicon Graphics (SGI), Template Graphics Software (TGS), and Netscape Communications have endorsed the accelerator for their VRML-based software. With GLINT-based graphics boards, VRML browser software will be seamlessly accelerated for a real-time 3-D experience on low-cost desktop PC systems.

As part of this announcement, SGI and TGS introduced WebSpace, a VRML-based Internet browser that's an add-on module to existing Web browsers. TGS will be providing its Open Inventor SDK with VRML Internet extensions compatible with GLINT boards.

Both Open Inventor and WebSpace use OpenGL as their graphics-rendering engine, and GLINT silicon was designed to enable the high-speed processing of all OpenGL commands and operations.

The 3Dlabs GLINT processor incorporates the equivalent of a high-end workstation graphics board set in a single chip. Target platforms include desktop PCs, workstations, and embedded systems. GLINT is capable of processing 300,000 shaded, depth-buffered, anti-aliased polygons/sec. The chip provides 32-bit color, 2-D and 3-D acceleration, an on-chip, PCI-compliant local bus interface, and integrated LUT-DAC control, making a complete graphics subsystem possible with minimal chip count. GLINT implements sophisticated rendering operations in silicon, including Gouraud shading, depth buffering, anti-aliasing, and texture mapping.

2010 N. 1st Street, Suite 403

San Jose, CA 95131

Template Graphics

9920 Pacific Heights, Suite 200

San Diego, CA 92121

InContext has released its InContext Spider, an HTML Web processor that lets you create dynamic Web pages while browsing on the World Wide Web. The company claims that Spider, unlike other HTML editors, does not require specialized knowledge of HTML to produce valid Web documents. You can run InContext Spider on any Windows-based system, and do everything from simple text editing to creating interactive pages linked to any number of Web sites. Spider speaks directly to the browser, allowing you to create Web pages interactively by inserting URLs to other topics, or external links which connect to other sites on the Web. By using the InContext SDK with InContext Spider, you can customize the interface, making it as simple or as advanced as the work environment demands. InContext Spider retails for about $100.00.

InContext Corp.

2 St. Clair Ave. West, Suite 1600

GX Sounds, from Genus Microprogramming, is a DOS sound-programming toolkit for C programmers. GX Sounds lets you control and utilize digital and MIDI sound on a variety of audio-output devices without knowing the details of the hardware. The software also provides the ability to automatically detect multiple sound devices. Detection drivers are loadable so that new detection routines can be added without requiring program modification. For MIDI playback, GX Sounds supports the OPL2 and OPL3 sound chips. The GX Sounds library sells for $249.00.

In a related announcement, Genus has released GX Images, a DOS graphics programming toolkit that lets you incorporate a variety of bitmapped image-file formats into application programs. The supported formats include Windows BMP, Dr. Halo CUT, GEM/Ventura IMG, JPEG (JFIF), GRASP/PICTOR PIC, HP PCL, ColorRIX, TARGA, TIFF, WordPerfect WPG, PCX, DCX, and EPS. The GX Image toolkit includes more than 50 library functions and several utility programs. The library supports C, Pascal, Fortran, and Clipper compilers in both real- and 16-bit protected mode. GX Images sells for $499.00 ($549.00 for 16-bit protected mode).

Genus Microprogramming

1155 Dairy Ashford, Suite 200

Houston, TX 77079

Realtime Performance has announced ControlPro, an integrated development environment for developers specializing in distributed control applications. The toolkit includes a drawing tool that lets you create custom screen objects, specify dynamic behaviors, and preview behaviors before writing application code. The GUI also provides a set of input objects called "graphical interactive screen management objects," which respond to input events.

At the heart of the C/C++ toolkit is an object-registry database for the storage and retrieval of configuration data, object definitions, and behavioral models. ControlPro is available for Windows NT, Windows 95, OS/2, and SunOS. Non-GUI components of the environment are portable to OS/2, iRMX-III, and VxWorks.

Realtime Performance

Sunnyvale, CA 94086

Virtual Media Technology has released its Virtual Media Hypertext Development Kit (HDK), which lets you create intuitive, context-sensitive help systems for Windows-based software. The Virtual Media HDK automatically converts previously created documents into full-featured hypertext systems that are displayed by the Windows Help engine.

The HDK includes graphics outlines; provides full-text indexing; and extends standard WinHelp capabilities by giving you ways of delivering pop-up glossaries, animation, 256-color and watermark bitmaps, and support for audio. In addition to generating source code, the HDK generates RTF and HPJ files. The HDK sells for $395.00.

Virtual Media Technology

1843 The Woods II

Cherry Hill, NJ 08003

The Kalendar from Artic Software is a calendar custom-control VBX that lets you develop calendars that have multiple views, international formats, data awareness, 3-D features, graphic wallpaper, and more. In all, the VBX provides 20 events so that you can customize the day boxes, draw your own calendar day boxes, and draw directly on the day boxes. The control, which works with Visual Basic, Visual C++, Borland C++, and Delphi, sells for $69.00.

Waterford, WI 53185-0028

XVT Software has announced its XVT Graphical Extensions, a library of graphics and plotting programs. In addition to common 2-D and 3-D bar charts and pie charts, Graphical Extensions includes support-line plots, area plots, impulse plots, scatter plots with error bars, and carpet plots with hidden-line removal. Linear, logarithmic, and semilog scales may be used on any axis.

For data-acquisition applications, real-time data updates are supported. Hot spots can be defined for user interaction and automatic zoom capabilities are included. Fonts, colors, and pen-brush styles are customizable. All 3-D images can be rotated for viewing from any direction. In addition, an intermediate-level Viewport API offers a broad set of geometry management functions for all graphics drawing needs.

XVT Graphical Extensions is available now for both the C and C++ versions of the XVT framework. It sells for $895.00 for Macintosh, Windows, and SCO UNIX systems, and $1600.00 for workstations.

4900 Pearl East Circle

Boulder, CO 80301

Beame & Whiteside Software has announced its BW-Connect News Server for Windows NT, which will let network administrators set up and maintain network news groups on any Windows NT-based PC. BW-Connect News Server for Windows NT supports multiple Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) clients and allows administrators to synchronize messages on news servers scattered throughout a network.

The software includes INN-like news extensions, such as NNTP commands (article, body, group, head, help, ihave, last, list, newsgroups, newnews, next, post, quit, slave, stat, listgroup, and xhdr). Since it is multithreaded, BW-Connect News Server for Windows NT can support an unlimited number of users; the only limitation is the capacity of the hardware platform and the memory space available. BW-Connect News Server for Windows NT also includes support for news synchronization so NNTP messages can be automatically forwarded at preset intervals to update other NNTP news servers located around the network. By using news forwarding, each news server can be synchronized to other NNTP servers so all network servers can carry the same newsgroup information, which should help localize network news traffic. Administrators will be able to set the news feeds to run fully synchronized or to only synchronize limited news groups.

BW-Connect News Server for Windows NT retails for $599.00.

Beame & Whiteside Software

706 Hillsborough Street

Raleigh, NC 27603-1655

BlueWater Systems has announced a Windows 95 version of its WinRT Tool Kit for developing Win32 hardware-control applications. The toolkit lets you write programs that directly access port I/O, memory I/O, and interrupts without dealing with the complexities of the Windows 95 Device Driver Kit. WinRT-based code is portable between NT and Windows 95. The WinRT Tool Kit, which includes the WinRT Device Driver (a set of dynamically loaded VxDs), the WinRT preprocessor, DOS simulator, NT Registry editor, and sample programs, sells for $395.00.

BlueWater Systems

144 Railroad Ave., Suite 217

Edmonds, WA 98020

Phar Lap and Periscope have teamed up to release Embedded Periscope for Phar Lap, a debugging tool for embedded-systems and real-time developers using Phar Lap's TNT Embedded ToolSuite system. The debugging tool, which sells for $3000.00, eliminates the need for in-circuit emulators to track down bugs in real-time software.

The Periscope Company

1475 Peachtree Street, Suite 100

Atlanta, GA 30309

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