Steve_Lesner@f170.n771.z3.fidonet.org (Steve Lesner) (05/19/91)
PO> I fully agree! The closer you tie a software package to the hardware the PO> better the peformance will be. In the case of video it can be orders of PO> magnitude. I totally diagree. If it wasn't for the portable code that many DOS authors wrote, we wouldn't have jack shit for OS/2 programs now! PO> The nice portable C function of fopen() adds better than 2K of program PO> code. The system call DosOpen adds around 10. Who cares nowadays? Are you saying I should whip out my old Wordstar Ver 1. 0 and run under 64k memory? Lets get real, code is going to be large nowadays and thats why systems like OS/2 break out of memory and system restraints. Besides, most all of the OS/2 source code I've seen uses Dosopen. One of the reasons I haven't started porting many of these famous DOS WWIV BBS games to OS/2 is because the code is too damn dependent on interupts, specific dos functions that only run under dos such as msdos(irq, regs), etc. Its a real nightmare, some of this stuff, that I just as soon start from scratch! PO> Using a GOOD video card and a 386 you can redraw the screen in about 8000 PO> clocks. Using a DosWrite its in the area of 50,000,000, and I shudder to PO> think what a putchar() would do to it. I do agree here but again, portability goes out the window. I too have been noted for bypassing standard dos calls and writing to the hardware. But I think that that solution too, is not good. What we need is some sort of mechanism to write to hardware in a portable way (which in itself is a conflict in terms). I understand the issue of screen speed. But I also understand the need to port. Many unix apps were written with the video routines in separate modules. This is a good idea as all an OS/2 programmerneeds to do is the replace that module alone. If the other modules are written with portability in mind (like many unix programmers do automatically),the world of programming would be a hell of a lot easier. --- Maximus-CBCS v1.02.OS/2.B0 * Origin: Uh Huh, OS/2, I've got the right one Baby, Uh Huh (1:141/261)