Comment by orbital-decay
1 day ago
It was crazy efficient on character or tile-based hardware. It makes no difference on bitmap displays, or rather adds some overhead.
1 day ago
It was crazy efficient on character or tile-based hardware. It makes no difference on bitmap displays, or rather adds some overhead.
At the end of the day it's always pixels - alway has been [1] - and the efficiency of storing and blitting a small number of fixed size rectangles is hard to beat if you can get away with it.
[1] Except for the early oscilloscope style vector displays maybe.
No, this is technically not fully correct. Early text based display output systems were relying on special character generator hardware to generate the display signals producing the text on screen. Those systems did not have any means of generating arbitrary pixel patterns.
Do you have an example? All the 8-bitters I know drew the characters from memory, which was a character ROM per default but could be changed either with a screw driver or by bank switching some RAM in-place.
EDIT: If you mean they were not copied in a frame buffer first, you are right. I should not have written 'blitting'.
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Character-based hardware only stores the characters and the grid instead of the full bitmap for the frame, which is very efficient memory-wise. Tile-based hardware (e.g. most console graphics chips in the 8/16 bit era) also had scrolling and layers, and was extremely memory-efficient as well. With bitmap displays you already store full frames.
Sure. Maybe I should not have written 'blitting' when the rectangles are not copied from one memory location to another but end up directly on the screen.
My original point that putting a fixed number of small and fixed rectangles on a screen is more efficient than line drawing still stands though.
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