Re: Direct Screen Writing...

David Gravereaux <davygrvy@pobox.com> wrote:
> Donal K. Fellows wrote:
>> If you were to assume
>> that you were using Windows, you'd want to be using DirectX for this
>> sort of stuff (it's a bad idea to go lower-level than that if you can
>> help it, as you start having to understand what the hardware vendors
>> were smoking when they made the video card you are using).
>
> Bring back the Hercules graphics card with a green screen, I say!

oh no, not hercules...
I already had bad feelings about CGA's two interlaced
memory banks, but hercules had even more and smaller
separate screen-memory banks, iirc.

Then there were also the sharp pocketcomputers, like
the pc1260 with four banks of 60 bytes screen-pixel-
memory for it's lcd, and the pc1403 with quite a lot
of just-a-few-pixel-columns separate blocks, which
were also used as stack for the builtin basic-interpreter...
You had to call out to some machine-code to turn
on the display, to even see the poke'd in pixels.
For the pc1260 I made a function graph plotter, although
it actually wasn't designed for pixelgraphics :-)
There were of course more models, and some models even
offered basic-commands for pixel-graphics, but those
weren't mine those days.
Received on Sun Dec 11 13:53:37 2005