From: kennu@mits.mdata.fi (Kenneth Falck) Subject: Re: Can you access a virtual console directly? Date: 17 Sep 1992 21:40:23 GMT
In article <1992Sep15.212642.26628@klaava.Helsinki.FI> wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius) writes:
>No. I can't think of anything that you can do with poking around in
>video memory directly that you can't do with a well designed set of
>control codes and a working console terminal driver. In fact, I assume
>that the sets of possible operations can be shown to equivalent.
I suppose you're mostly right, I'm just feeling claustrophobic
when I can't do what I want to the hardware :-), but has anyone
calculated how much console output slows down because of these
control codes? I mean, I used Telemate with MSDOS for a while
but got tired with the slowliness of the output (which was
caused by the nice windowing environment, I suppose), and
switched back to Telix who modifies 0xB800 directly and is
fast enough. (I have a USR with V.32bis.)
I'll have to experiment some more with Linux, maybe even
stopwatch some timings for output in C-Kermit, XComm
and Telix, and minicom once I download it from somewhere.
-- kennu@mits.mdata.fi