Re: Interested in starting some basic development

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>]

Joel Stanley wrote:

>> All these APIs exist because it's terribly hard to program directly to the
>> hardware. Almost all gfx boards need to be accessed differently at the

>interrupts, setting video modes, etc. Once I understand what's really
>going on at the hardware level, using an existing API would clearly be the
>way to go. However, I'm immediately at a disadvantage if I don't get down
>and dirty with the hardware at least once before writing multi-platform
>multi-gfx card portable code...

Certainly not. You have to know which operations cost much time and which
don't, that's it. And using a higher level API (such as OpenGL) will give
you that knowledge just as well.

The only place where you need to really know what's going on at the
hardware level is at writing actual drivers. Really.

And about the interrupt calling etc of the DOS game(s) you mentioned - that
either describes just VESA or plain old VGA (both of which use only a small
part of modern gfx boards' capabilities) or describe the way to program
*one* kind of gfx board. There's no guarantee that other boards are not
programmed *completely* different, so that the knowledge you gained from
studying the one example is completely useless for the other.

Cu
	Christian
--

AAAAA - American Association Against Acronym Abuse