开发WinCE显示驱动（转）

Introduction to Writing Windows CE Display Drivers

Introduction

For many developers, writing display drivers can be an intimidating task. Windows CE, Microsoft's operating system targeted toward embedded devices, is no exception. Fortunately, Microsoft provides C++ classes that can be used to simplify writing display drivers. As convenient as these classes are, there are improvements than can be made to them that can further simplify display driver development and make display drivers more portable across Windows CE devices.

Increased portability provides additional value for display drivers as Windows CE moves to different platforms with various display requirements, such as Internet appliances, video conferencing systems, and game consoles. Even within a product family, such as HPCs, this portability is valuable as each generation of product adds more features and functionality and moves to different display hardware.

This article reviews the fundamentals of graphics, display hardware, and Windows CE display driver development, including the display driver C++ classes. It then explores improvements to the C++ classes that will simplify display driver development. At the end, you will have a set of improved display driver classes that should be simple enough to quickly and easily get running on any device, yet complete enough to support any additional hardware features. Of course, this doesn't prevent you from making your own improvements as well.

Fundamentals of Graphics and Display Hardware

For those developers not familiar with the principles of graphics hardware, it is worth providing a quick overview of the fundamentals of graphics and display technology in the context of a typical Windows CE display device. Graphics hardware is primarily composed of a display controller, a frame buffer and a DAC. The display controller handles access to the frame buffer by the CPU, generates the video timing for the current display mode, and fetches the display data from the frame buffer to be displayed. The frame buffer stores the display data. The DAC, or digital to analog converter, converts the digital display data to an analog format to be sent to the monitor. This is necessary since most monitors expect analog voltage levels that represent the intensity of each color channel. The diagram below demonstrates the relationship among these components. It should be noted that as a result of the high level of integration achieved in today's silicon, all three components can be found in a single chip from some manufacturers.



Because most monitors cannot maintain the display image on their own, the display must be continuously refreshed. For the standard non-interlaced display, this is done one line at a time in sequence. Interlaced displays, such as televisions, refresh all the even lines first, then all the odd lines, sometimes resulting in display flicker. The time after one display line is completed and before the next one is started is called the horizontal blanking period. The time after a complete display refresh is done and until the next display refresh is started is called the vertical blanking period. These blanking periods are the result of monitor technology requirements. Cathode ray tubes, or CRTs, used in monitors direct a beam along the face of the tube. This beam causes phosphors on the tube to emit light, which you see as the display. After the beam traces a line across the tube, it needs to retrace to the beginning of the next line. While it is retracing, the beam is shut off, or blanked. The same applies for a complete display with vertical retracing and blanking.

The display itself is organized in rows and columns. Each element, or pixel, in the display is stored in the frame buffer, where between one and thirty-two bits are used per pixel. The color of a pixel is represented by the intensity of each of the red, green, and blue color channels. These intensities are represented directly by the pixel data in modes where a pixel is 16 bits or more. When a pixel is 8 bits or less, the pixel data usually represents an index into a color look-up table. This look-up table stores the red, green, and blue intensities for each index in the palette of currently available colors. In this case, the look-up table values are passed to the DAC.



In Windows, bitmaps are used to represent graphical images. A bitmap typically contains the pixel data for the image, the dimensions and color depth of the image, and possibly the palette for the image, among other things. Information in a Windows bitmap is not directly available, but is abstracted and only accessible through calls to Win32 APIs. A Windows CE display driver typically sees bitmaps in a format called a surface. These surfaces contain the information of the bitmap, but in a format that is directly accessible by the display driver.

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