🚀 go-pugleaf

>One other comment about the stuff on Simtel: There is a previewer
>called dvivga.  If you don't have a VGA, you may have decided not to
>bother looking at it.  In fact it works on VGA, EGA, or MCGA.  I am
>using it with an EGA on a 10MHz AT clone (Leading Edge D2).  It is
>acceptably fast, though no speed demon.  Make sure you use the arrow
>keys for moving around on the screen, not the letter commands "u" and
>"d".  The arrow keys are much faster.

I am the author of dvivga. If you have a 28msec or slower hard disk,
a disk cache, even a poor one, will speed it up a lot.
If you have an 18 msec disk drive, the speedup is not very important.

>There is a dvi2herc for Hercules.  So about the only monitor that
>there didn't seem to be a driver for was CGA.  
It is easy to hack dvivga to make it run on a CGA. It looks so 
bad I refuse to post it.

>It looks like dvivga uses floating point as well.  It would be
>interesting to see whether a similar speedup could be done to it.
>However with the vga, character widths are somewhat larger, so the
>simple strategy I used may not give enough accuracy.  It might be
>necessary to do some scaling.

Yes, dvivga uses floating point. Everybody adound here has an'87.
On my 20 Mhz 386 Dell 310 turning off the floating point chip
(which you do by setting the envrionment variable NO87=  )
makes it run 28% slower.

Incidentally, the distributed .exe file of dvivga contains special
code which uses real 32 bit instructions on a 386 to make it run
faster. It tests for a 386 (and, hopefully, 486) and runs 
accordingly, automatically. This code is not in the distributed
source - with the Microsoft assembler I have to hack the 
compiler output in MACHINE (NOT ASSEMBLY) code, as this assembler
won't assemble 386 specific opcodes. :-( :-( :-( :-( 386 machine
code is tricky! There are about 20 hand coded instructions in hex.

Doug McDonald