C integral types [was Re: Semi-OT: Why Kids Can't use Computers] (fwd)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 07:15:26PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   There were 2 "fully supported" alternatives to poking bytes directly
> to the screen.  The problem is that they were painfully slow, especially
> on an under-powered 8088.  The first alternative was writing to screen
> via BIOS calls.  It was definitely slower than direct pokes.  The other
> alternative was writing to screen and positioning the cursor using ANSI
> escape sequences.  BIOS was "slow", ANSI was "slowest".

Of course it was.  ANSI.SYS was a DOS extention, so you were writing
to ANSI.SYS which then would write to the BIOS.  Yet another layer
of abstraction.  Of course it wasn't going to be faster than going direct
to the video BIOS.  Now if ANSI.SYS had known how to directly talk to
the video hardware, then it could have been faster perhaps.  I don't
recall ever seeing any optimized versions of ANSI.SYS for VGA cards
specificly.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists