Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 08:06:21 -0400 (EDT) From: randir To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: OpenDOS graphics drivers In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Precedence: bulk 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]..