Steven Solie

Hardware accelerated Porter/Duff image compositing is available with new IGraphics->CompositeTags() function. This can be very handy for all sorts of cool graphical effects. For example, the 3D effects on Workbench apply this function.

Note that when hardware acceleration is not available, IGraphics->CompositeTags() will use software rendering instead which can be very slow. Not all video modes will support hardware compositing either.

Blitting on the Amiga OS used to be a myriad of function calls for different situations. This has all been consolidated to a single IGraphics->BltBitMapTags() call which a few more features added. IGraphics->BltBitMapTags() will also attempt to use hardware acceleration whenever possible. Prefer to use this new function to remain more future proof.

The icon.library has had some major work and includes a new interface and support for 32 bit deep Amiga icons with alpha channel. Additional functionality includes icon scaling, support for plugins (e.g. for vector based icons) and access to icon image data.