Windows CE Display Hardware Recommendations

Microsoft has several recommends for display hardware used with Windows CE. These recommendations are both to improve performance and to facilitate your display driver development effort. You can still write a fully functional display driver even if your hardware does not conform to these recommendations, or if it is too late in the design cycle for your product to alter the hardware design, at the expense of additional effort in implementing the driver.

Memory Layout

Microsoft strongly recommends that your display hardware use a linear frame buffer. All of your display's memory should be contiguous, and preferably there should be one linear access window that covers the entire frame buffer. Hardware that does not meet this recommendation will require that you make substantial modifications to the GPE classes if you choose to use them. See Using GPE Classes for more information.

Your display hardware should also use a supported combination of pixel format, packing, and pixel ordering. See Display Buffer Formats for more information. The display hardware's frame buffer should have the following properties:

• Top-down format, with pixel (0,0) at the top left, and pixel (width-1, height-1) at the lower right.
• The frame buffer's stride, the number of bytes in memory that it takes to represent one scan line on the display, should be a multiple of four bytes, even if that means padding the end of each scan line with unused bytes.
• The entire frame buffer must be accessible by the CPU without the CPU having to perform bank selection.
• Frame buffers should not use bit-planes, in which separate frame buffers are used for each color channel or intensity component.

Acceleration

Microsoft recommends that you use display hardware which can accelerate the following operations, in order of decreasing importance:

• Solid color fills. Specifically, Blt operations whose pbo->iSolidColor member is not 0xFFFFFFFF.
• SRCCOPY Blt operations.
• Cursor display, if your platform uses a cursor.
• Solid line drawing with sub-pixel precision.
• Masked SRCCOPY Blt operations.