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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

Ten lines? Why so complicated? Back in my day we did it with just two lines:

    mov al, 13
    int 10

And then you pushed your pixels to the video segment (a0000). So simple and elegant...

But my dad still mocked me because it was too complicated! Back in his day, you didn't need to bother with stupid video modes, and could just POKE the pixels to your screen!

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oh man, mode 13!!! I still have this line embedded in my head (Turbo Pascal 7)

mem[$A000:x+(320*y)] := color

Don't forget trying to pick a palette, and those sweet, sweet palette cycling effects for things like water.

Not only this is architectural specific (needs BIOS to map a specific constant range of memory), but this will cause a lot of software interrupts. Interrupts, like exceptions, are _bad_.

In UEFI you have VESA Video Mode to handle most of the annoying mode selection stuff and GOP to handle...memory mapped framebuffer in linear address, so that you can just write directly to the framebuffer to push your pixel...that's even simpler.

You want double or triple buffering? Just make another memory buffer with the same dimension and strides, and recursively push each level of buffer up on render, easy.

Bug, you want: mov al, 13h

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