Hello, all I am looking for is a fast way to plot a pixel in regular mode 13h. This would be easy, except for the fact I am using a very recent machine (Athlon 1400, Geforce3) with Windows 98SE and Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. I am trying to make simple graphics applications to try and mimic the old games from pre-windows era. I understand that Windows will not let me directly access video. I am not prepared to use Directx and would rather have my own routine for just plotting pixels fastly. What would be my best choice as a beginning programmer to make programs that can draw to the screen? Thank you for your time.

This message was edited by the etlusk at 2002-4-5 7:50:21

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: Hello, all I am looking for is a fast way to plot a pixel in regular mode 13h. This would be easy, except for the fact I am using a very recent machine (Athlon 1400, Geforce3) with Windows 98SE and Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. I am trying to make simple graphics applications to try and mimic the old games from pre-windows era. I understand that Windows will not let me directly access video. I am not prepared to use Directx and would rather have my own routine for just plotting pixels fastly. What would be my best choice as a beginning programmer to make programs that can draw to the screen? Thank you for your time.
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WINDOWS does have a SETPIXEL routine and should be fairly fast on your machine. I have rewriiten a few 'old' games just using MoveTO, LineTo, Rectangle and BitBlt. The hard part is the PEN and BRUSH stuff. It can be really obnoxius at times. And getting that smooooth animation takes some work. I have worked with OPENGL somewhat but it's not much better. My all time favorite is SVGACC from Zeypher SW. But it won't work with WINDOWS:(

Just Say 'NO' to MCF!

: Hello, all I am looking for is a fast way to plot a pixel in regular mode 13h. This would be easy, except for the fact I am using a very recent machine (Athlon 1400, Geforce3) with Windows 98SE and Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. I am trying to make simple graphics applications to try and mimic the old games from pre-windows era. I understand that Windows will not let me directly access video. I am not prepared to use Directx and would rather have my own routine for just plotting pixels fastly. What would be my best choice as a beginning programmer to make programs that can draw to the screen? Thank you for your time.
:

Check out this page. Go to game tools page and download the zip file for the Black Art of Game Development. In this file there are files called Blackx.c where x is a number. They all build on more concepts but any of them will give you an excellent way to plot pixels to the screen. I use these files all the time.

Jay

The thing is: even if you succeed to create a console-application running in mode 13, windows will still simulate the mode and translate everything and so instead of being faster, the system will slow down. As you are planning to do it in windows, try to find out the basics about DirectDraw. Creating a single backbuffer & setting the screen resolution to (in your case) 320*240*8 will do the job. You can lock the secondary buffer and write directly into its memory. DirectDraw is well documented and there are plenty of examples online.

Yes,DDraw will be one of the fastest possible ways to write to the screen.But it still doesnt provide functions to plot single pixels on the screen,you need to create severall COM-objects to access the video-mem directly.you still need to calculate the offset in videomemory of a given pixel by hand.however ddraw gives some routines to draw entire pictures (bitmaps) to the screen using hardware-accelaration.

by the way: dx80 doesnt have ddraw anymore,the 2d-stuff is done by d3d,too.