Table of Contents

About

Although FBlit is thoroughly documented, some settings are not emphasised enough so this tutorial should give you the main highlights on the knobs that could be used to tweak your AGA machine.

FBlit

You can see FBlit as the equivalent of Real-Time Graphics (RTG) software but for AGA machines. Regardless of any other patches, FBlit is system-compliant must-have patch that is about as important as SetPatch itself. In case you are running OS3.9, then without FBlit (and in the absence of RTG hardware), the system will be excruciatingly slow and most of the chip RAM will vanish quickly even if there is plenty of fast RAM available.

One of the fetures of FBlit is that it is able to delegate certain operations to be processed in either chip RAM or passed on to fast RAM - which is great for processing icons (drawers will large amount of icons will eat up chip RAM fast).

Icons

Icons can be rendered in fast RAM using PeterK's Icon Library. In case there are issues with the screen flickering, then a few changes in FBlit preferences can suppress the annoying behaviour.

Making Applications use FBlit

FBlit can run in two modes:

However, FBlit can also be configured to intercept applications, determine whether they could benefit from FBlit and add them to the select box in the FBLit preferences application. This option is to be found under: FAllocBitMap→Task Logging and should be set to Enabled.

Next, when applications are opened, they will be first scanned by FBlit and added to the include list. Applications should be selected from the drop-down and added to the list.

FBlit does ship with a few programs in its include list however IBrowse will not be there such that it has to be added before it will benefit from FBlit.

Additional FBlit Patches

The FBlit documentation mentions FText - it is an additional patch that renders text in fast RAM. To install, download the FText archive and copy FText to C: and then modify S:startup-sequence and add call after C:FBlit:

C:FBlit
C:FText