Hi.

I was recently asked by a friend if I could write him a screensaver that did something similar to an opengl screensaver - just without opengl. the basic concept was to manipulate pixels on the screen to create a wave effect.

The only thing standing in my way is that I need some way to manipulate pixels on the screen. opengl has several function for that, as "man -k pixel" revealed, but I don't seem to find any other libraries for it. Reasonably, the X-server needs to have something of that sort, perhaps even something related to ncurses (??? ).

If anybody knows what libraries I can use to accomplish this, please give me a hint.

Thanks

Is there a reason to avoid OpenGL? If your effect is simple, it will be quite renderable on most hardware. In any case, I would think that the SDL library would provide functionality that you seek, as well as (I believe) the gtk+ and QT libraries.

The machine crumbles under any form of graphical load. I don't know the specifications by heart, but it runs xfce as GUI, and even then it is slow. The graphics involve a simulation of a rotating spiral galaxy. My firend provides me with the math, I write the program.

Thanks for the tip on sdl.

What library lies below stdio? printing characters need pixel manipulation, so unless the character printing is compiled into the kernel (as far as I know only character maps are), should those libraries not be available?