advice for legacy system graphics

[xoxos]

i'm looking for any general advice regarding graphics programming on an old XP system -

i've been 3D software rendering for a few years, so i am familiar with the math and enjoy using my own code, except that i am limited to a few hundred triangles. i'm exploring using a GDI so that i can increase the number.

the GPU has opengl 1.4, and i understand that opengl is less involved than directx, so i thought i'd learn that, but i've now spent two hours struggling to find the material pertinent to this version.

can anyone recommend a tutorial, should i focus on reading materials for 2.0 or 1.0?


i enjoy programming to figure out my own ways of doing things, i really don't want some API to do everything for me - i've written my own AA lines, circles and triangles, i'm only looking for a faster way to get my things onto the screen.

i don't know what people call that nowadays, but i really appreciate advice that helps me spend more of my time doing things my own way.

i would be very happy if i could find a simple, fast way of drawing a non-AA triangle of a single colour, not even vertex shaded. but i'm baffled by eg. an example that gives screen coordinates from 0 to 1.0 instead of in pixels.





so, i'm asking for general advice, because it has been frustrating trying to find information on opengl 1.4

advice like.. quit windows, move to linux? (there are no meatspace programmers around here, so i have no real people to ask)

or like.. a fast opengl tutorial that will put a triangle on my bitmap in pixels..

or any advice that helps me avoid using resources that i'm not already stuck with! ;)



really, a tutorial that doesn't keep gonig over the basics of graphics pipelines we all know already and just tells me how to do things would be great!