alcinnz
Question: What was graphics programming like in early versions of Mac OS or Windows? Before GPUs became mainstays?
Who can tell me?
Having gained an understanding of what computer graphics involves, creating GUIs on 1980s or early 90s CPUs seems like quite the accomplishment!
LovesTha🥧
@alcinnz I think there is some pretty good content on Commander Keen and Doom out there on the level of tricks they needed to use to make them work (Even Keen was beyond what most thought that hardware could do)
alcinnz
@LovesTha I have some idea of the tricks Doom used, maybe I should read more! It is interesting!
I haven't heard of Commander Keen...
At the same time I reckon even simple "productivity" apps would've been an accomplishment!
Daniel Pache⚓
@LovesTha @alcinnz yeah, mainly sprites, reused, rotated, duplicated and with different color palettes. Also, while the first 3dfx graphics cards supported polygons, there were competing technologies like raytracing. Btw. I bought my first dedicated graphics card for video playback, not gaming. It was a tseng et3000? Before: max 200*150px video. After: 800*600px smooth playback.
Btw. there was a ms/dr-dos competitor named novell-dos with a 3d network shooter. Limited graphics but really good.
alcinnz
@deep470 Hmmmm... Wikipedia indicates that 3dfx was late-90s. A pioneer in hardware-accelerated graphics, but we've accomplished great things (like Doom) before that!
Harald Eilertsen
alcinnz
@harald Makes sense!
A framebuffer in RAM would be enough to accelerate most "productivity" apps, especially if its less data than modern screens!
LovesTha🥧
@alcinnz oh, Commander Keen was revolutionary, getting that running on an x86 and not a console was impressive.
ID software did a lot of stuff that was impressive.
archiloque
@alcinnz the part 2 of https://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/ has lots of things
alcinnz
@archiloque Yay, something to read!
Martin Atkins
@alcinnz
When you ask about Windows, are you asking from the perspective of someone writing an application for the platform, or someone implementing that platform?
For the former, the original graphics API is called "Graphics Device Interface" (GDI) and provides a number of 2D drawing operations that can be implemented either in software or in hardware, depending on the driver.
I believe modern Windows still supports this, so the API docs are still out there.
alcinnz
@apparentlymart Both!
O.K., I'll look up GDI!
Martin Atkins
@alcinnz
I have no direct experience with classic Windows display driver development, but I found this article interesting:
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/display-drivers-os2-and-16-bit-windows/
Three exact details are glossed over a little but I found it interesting that at this point it wasn't clear what different display hardware might have in common yet, and so essentially the entire graphics stack was reinvented for each driver.
alcinnz
@apparentlymart Thanks!
Martin Atkins
@alcinnz Hello again!
I came across the following today and remembered this old thread:
https://github.com/PluMGMK/vbesvga.drv
It's a shared-source Windows 3.1 display driver targeting VESA BIOS extensions. My x86 asm is too rusty to get into the weeds of it, but seems to confirm the earlier article's claim of needing to reimplement the entire graphics stack in each driver!
(I'm not entirely sure what its license is since several parts of it are listed as copyright Microsoft)
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.