1. The Hermes pixel-format library Hermes is a library that does the dirty work of a graphics library or application that nobody else wants to do, and it does it fast because the effort is concentrated on just that. The thing nobody wants to do is conversion between pixel formats - between all pixel formats that is, not between any two. There are handwritten assembler routines in Hermes that should make anything look fast. An application or library that uses Hermes will for example be able to render into one buffer and convert it to whatever pixel format is available on the target platform at the time. Other services provided by Hermes include palette handling including caching of lookup tables, and surface clearing to a specific colour value. See http://www.clanlib.org/ for more info From Debian 3.0r0 APT