Re: low level graphics

John Dallman [311000] wrote:
"dave frost" <dj.frost@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

That was one of the most useful responses iv had. In short, im a
curious sort and just want to fiddle with the silicone :-)

Something to understand before you got too far with this. Any such
code you write that hits the graphics hardware directly will only
work on machines with the same video hardware. As in, pretty
much, the same make and model of video card. If you want to
distribute your software at all, you'll need to start devising some
kind of device driver system, and this rapidly explodes into a
ridiculously complex job. Been there, done that, still got the scars.

One of the primary reasons for the success of graphical
environments, such as MS Windows and X-Windows is that they
provide APIs that hide much of the complexity and variations of
hardware. This used to mean that using all the capabilities of the
hardware through their device driver systems was hard, but
nowadays, hardware is more designed to fit their programming
models than the other way around.

So the style of programming you're interested in isn't useful for
much beyond personal satisfaction. If that's what you're working
on, no problem.

John


quite right this is persona satisfaction realy, im curious about this sort of thing and have been for a while. Im finding getting started a bit hard though. svgalib seems to do quite a bit if ioctl calls on the tty, is there something going on with going into graphics mode on the tty ? I always ttought a tty was character based ?

cheers

Dave
.

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