🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug10.185209.28572@wam.umd.edu> dmb@wam.umd.edu (David M. Baggett) writes:
>In article <Bss3pz.KLD@news.cso.uiuc.edu> tmkk@uiuc.edu (Khan) writes:
>>With a full screen, you have to draw the animation portion of the screen
>>AND the status information. This takes time, and since the status info
>>changes at a much slower rate than the animation, you're doing a lot of
>>drawing which is unnecessary since you're simply redrawing the exact
>>same picture over and over again.
>
>Is there something about the 320x400 mode that forces you to do this?

Not that I know of.

>I don't see any reason why you can't draw your status window on each
>of your page flip screens once and then just leave it there undisturbed.

There's no way I know to draw to both pages at once. What you have to do
is draw your status info to one page and then draw it again to the
other. This takes twice as long to do. I see your point about not having
to update it every frame; as with everything in programing, it's a
tradeoff. If the status info changes frequently, but not quite as
frequently as the animation rate, you may be better off not having to
perform two buffer writes for each status area update, especially if the
status area is complex. If the status area changes only rarely, then
drawing it twice won't have much of an efct on the overall performance
of the program.

BTW, I gather that some games do use this technique. There was an issue
of GameBytes which had a screen shot of some game (might even have been
Wolf, I can't remember now). The upper portion of the screen showed the
normal stuff, but the bottom of the screen was garbage. The caption to
the screen shot apologized for the incomplete picture, saying that the
split-screen mode used by the program was incompatible with their screen
capture program.