Hi everybody,

> Thank you all for the recommendations. I've been spending some time

Yes, let me also use this opportunity to express my gratetude to the
helpful people around here. Ingo: I am looking very much forward to read
your latest paper, it seems like the kind of research I'd like to
conduct during my masters year (as a thesis). =)

[OS independency]
> Unfortunately, my computers are currently all running Windows.

Now that is a shame. =) For cross platform computer graphics, I can
recommend SDL (http://www.libsdl.org/). Quoting from the home page:
"Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Win32, BeOS, MacOS, Solaris,
IRIX, and FreeBSD". Although I never tried it under anything else than
Linux, I still vouch for it. It is extremely simple to use (exception
handling removed):

SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO);
SDL_Surface *screen = SDL_SetVideoMode(640, 480, 32, SDL_SWSURFACE |
SDL_DOUBLEBUF | SDL_HWACCEL);
Uint32 *buffer = (Uint32 *)screen->pixels;
buffer[y * 640 + x] = 0xRrGgBb;
SDL_Flip(screen);

This piece of code initializes SDL, opens a window (fullscreen also a
possibility), sets a single pixel, and flips the buffers. =)

> 4) Is there a good profiler I can use with this? (Again, is the
> Windows version better/worse?)

I am using GNU gprof (http://www.gnu.org/manual/gprof-2.9.1/), which
gives me all details I need, and then some. =)

best regards,
Daniel
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~daniel/