On Tue, 20 Apr 1999, Jacek Lipkowski wrote:
> why not just make an interface to the vga bios and add some draw line /
> draw circle / fill / and similar functions, this would be much smaller
> than a full blown vgalib
VGA BIOS is unacceptably slow, especially on the already lethargic systems
that ELKS is targeted at. A very simple set of primitives could be ported
from a DOS VGA library. To be honest, if you REALLY want graphics in
ELKS, you might want to consider a model like pre-Windows/386 had. In
this world, windows did not overlap, the screen was divided up equally
between non-minimized applications (or was there even a minimize option? -
I can't remember).
One application:
+----------+
| |
| App1 |
| |
+----------+
Two applications:
+------+------+ +----------+
| | | | App1 |
| App1 | App2 | OR +----------+
| | | | App2 |
+------+------+ +----------+
Further applications would split up the subwindows. You get the idea. It
wasn't the most handsome, but it DID avoid expensive overlap-check
operations, and you didn't have to draw the screen to a secondary buffer
(or even worse, draw overlapping windows in full view of the user).
Windows 1.x was also black-and-white, I believe. No scalable fonts, etc,
etc.
Shane
