Message-Id: <3.0.16.19971010190527.1a77c3e2@hem1.passagen.se>
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 19:05:40 -0400
To: Shawn Hargreaves <Shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk>
From: Peter Palotas <blizzar AT hem1 DOT passagen DOT se>
Subject: Re: Mouse Cursors again!
Cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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>With a hardware cursor, the pointer image is stored in a totally
>different part of vram and overlayed by the display circuitry, so it
>doesn't interfere with your display updates. This is very much like the
>way hardware sprites worked on the C64, SNES, etc, but specialised for a
>pointer display (typically only monochrome 32x32 cursors are supported).

Good ol' C64! =)

>>Or is it a feature of the graphics card, that varies for each graphics 
>>card? If that is the case, it must be able to do it using VESA, right!?
>
>No. VESA is an interface for direct framebuffer access: it doesn't
>provide any accelerated hardware routines. Such things are supported by
>the VBE/AF API, but SciTech are still working on their drivers for that,
>so it isn't widely supported at the moment. The /AF spec isn't available
>anywhere on the net, but you can order it from www.vesa.org...

VBE/AF API? I guess that is what UniVBE gives you, huh?
You're saying that SciTech are still working on their drivers for "that".
Do you mean hardware mouse cursor support? I find this really interesting,
since it can be quite annoying with flickering mouse-cursors. I mean, they
look so good in Windows... Why couldn't they look as good in DOS then? 

Well, I guess it's somewhat impossible to implement a hardware mouse-cursor
in DOS, since noone but microsoft seems to have done this! :(


-- Peter Palotas alias Blizzar -- blizzar AT hem1 DOT passagen DOT se --

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