History: A Way Forward
Published: 04-Jan-2022
All this GUI changing and running in circles got old. The best way forward? I decided to write the GUI ourselves. That way I knew exactly who was to blame when there were problems!
However, nobody I talked to had any Super VGA programming experience. I needed higher resolutions and wanted more color depth than standard VGA offered.
Still, trying to find a GUI library was proving fruitless. Time to own this problem.
It took a couple weeks, but I ended up with a decent starting point for building code to run on an SVGA adapter in a variety of resolutions and color depths depending on what the user's PC was capable of moving around.
As with the general GUI search, this involved several false starts. In the end I settled on a balance of ease-of-use for the developer and performance for the user. It can always get faster later!
(These two screens show a true-color image reduced to 8 bit and a very poorly recorded demonstration of rapidly moving multiple surfaces in real time. The stuttering in the movement is due to the recording, not the program.)
