Mail Archives: opendos/1997/05/13/08:09:21
DirectX mostly just lets you bypass Windoze's own personal buffering
system which is too top heavy, and do direct screen writes. It does
the occasional nice thing like setting up the graphics card for you,
but it does not make ALL graphics go faster, since some cards use
funky addressing schemes.. [generally they are older cards that are a pain
to code for anyways :]
We are still at the point where if you want fast graphics, tweaked mode 13
is still your best bet its only 8 bit, but that also gives you 4 planes,
and works on all graphics cards that are VGA compatible.
Look at Quake...[for dos]... it is using a wonderful DPMI server.
Runs in tweaked VGA modes... [except if you decide to get winquake
but why you'd do that is beyond me]... and actually is playable
on a 486dx66...
Remeber Graphics only have to be so fast. Once you approach the human
brain's refresh rate you can't get any better. [and yes there are programs
comming out that exploit faster screen refresh rates for subliminal
self improvment stuff]
The biggest problem facing designers is the speed of the engine
which is developing those screens.
Now the ideal nice system would simply a task permanently sync'd to the
monitor, that would display a number of pages in order which can be
written to by other tasks. Ofcourse, doing so you bring yourself one
step closer to windows [but atleast your designed for game play from the
start]..
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