IBM's PGA Adapter

From: Eric J. Korpela <korpela_at_ellie.ssl.berkeley.edu>
Date: Mon Apr 23 18:39:10 2001

> Looking at the manual, it would appear that the PGC would not be much use
> for displaying bitmapped graphics. It's designed to display lines, arcs,
> polygons, etc, described as such (i.e. draw a line from point 1 to point
> 2). It would appear to be a reasonable card (for the time) for CAD, or
> graph plotting, or something like that.

It does support image display to some extent. It has an
image_write function (0xd9) that will write a bunch of pixels.
The function (only available in binary command mode) is of the format
{0xd9,y_start,x_start,x_end} followed by packets containing the pixel values.
It certainly wasn't fast, but it was faster than setting each pixel
individually. Wouldn't recommend trying to write a graphics intensive
game for it, though.
 
Eric
Received on Mon Apr 23 2001 - 18:39:10 BST