TinyGL

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TinyGL 0.4 (c) 1997-2002 Fabrice Bellard.

General Description:

TinyGL is intended to be a very small implementation of a subset of OpenGL* for embedded systems or games. It is a software only implementation. Only the main OpenGL calls are implemented. All the calls I considered not important are simply not implemented.

The main strength of TinyGL is that it is fast and simple because it has not to be exactly compatible with OpenGL. In particular, the texture mapping and the geometrical transformations are very fast.

The main features of TinyGL are:

Examples:

I took three simple examples from the Mesa package to test the main functions of TinyGL. You can link them to either TinyGL, Mesa or any other OpenGL/GLX implementation. You can also compile them with Microwindows.

Architecture:

TinyGL is made up four main modules:

To use TinyGL in an embedded system, you should look at the GLX layer and modify it to suit your need. Adding a more user friendly developper layer (as in Mesa) may be useful.

Notes - limitations:

Why ?

TinyGL was developped as a student project for a Virtual Reality network system called VReng (see the VReng home page at http://www-inf.enst.fr/vreng).

At that time (January 1997), my initial project was to write my own 3D rasterizer based on some old sources I wrote. But I realized that it would be better to use OpenGL to work on any platform. My problem was that I wanted to use texture mapping which was (and is still) quite slower on many software OpenGL implementation. I could have modified Mesa to suit my needs, but I really wanted to use my old sources for that project.

I finally decided to use the same syntax as OpenGL but with my own libraries, thinking that later it could ease the porting of VReng to OpenGL.

Now VReng is at last compatible with OpenGL, and I managed to patch TinyGL so that VReng can still work with it without any modifications.

Since TinyGL may be useful for some people, especially in the world of embedded designs, I decided to release it 'as is', otherwise, it would have been lost on my hard disk !