27 Mar
2007
27 Mar
'07
1:28 a.m.
Dave McGuire wrote:
For early PC editors, having to go through the BIOS
is the big display
update bottleneck. Some programs achieved very fast screen updates by
writing directly to the display memory. The venerable list.com comes to
mind.
Most of the ones I tested already write directly to screen ram -- the
slowdown occurs when the internal structure the text is kept in (partial
span trees, etc.) is so complex that merely painting the screen by
traversing the structure is too slow. The fastest editors usually don't
have a functional undo because such functionality usually requires
something slightly more complex than a simple linked list of lines/strings.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/