🚀 go-pugleaf

I've been trying to write a computer movie, and I got interested in
the idea of text animation when I saw my VGA card had a mode for
80 x 50 text characters.  I thought that if I used colored spaces
placed on the screen, using (say) the BASIC COLOR and LOCATE/PRINT
statements as a replacement for a 'putpixel' routine, I could
create a very fast-moving if somewhat cheap animated screen.

However, I tried doing this and it seems disappointingly slow. Of
course this is probably because I was using the QBASIC interpreter
that comes with DOS; but then again, this interpreter was on a
386/33 PC.  Is it feasible to use text mode animation in the way I
described, with some other language, perhaps?  Would it be in
general faster than typical pixel-based animation?

I also heard about 'ANSI', which seems to be an improved form of
text mode.  Would this make for good animation instead?

What I was planning, BTW; a simple set of numbers would act as a
code for a 'text bitmap', which could be placed on the screen at
various places.  0-15 would represent a space of a certain color,
while 16 would be transparent; in the animation program, I would
account for a larger, background text bitmap image that had a
special place in the program's data arrays, and other bitmaps would
be placed over this, being replaced by the background's color space
data when erased.  The '16-transparent' would represent a space
which would have the same data as the background for that position
on the screen.

Anyhow, could someone please give any advice or comments on how I
could do this quickly and smoothly?

-Aphoriel/Kinsman