A Call for the Publishing of Blt-Stones

Blt-stones, pronounced "blit-stones" are a set of standard routines for interfacing application programs to graphics memories on personal computers. Blt stands for block transfer, and in computer graphics its most common use is combined with bit, as in bitbit. Blt-stones make color bitbits fast and easy to code. They provide both quantitative and qualitative information about graphics hardware performance, and they give insight into the architectures of graphics boards. They can be used to count the number of pixel-writes per secound, or to determine how many bytes of code are required to gain access to a board's memory. Blt-stones is a term coined by the authors to be a graphics analog to whetsones and dhrysones, performance measures for computer processing speeds.