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## Chapter 34
Changing Colors without Writing Pixels

### Special Effects through Realtime Manipulation of DAC Colors

Sometimes, strange as it may seem, the harder you try, the less you accomplish. Brute force is fine when it suffices, but it does not always suffice, and when it does not, finesse and alternative approaches are called for. Such is the case with rapidly cycling through colors by repeatedly loading the VGA’s Digital to Analog Converter (DAC). No matter how much you optimize your code, you just can’t reliably load the whole DAC cleanly in a single frame, so you had best find other ways to use the DAC to cycle colors. What’s more, BIOS support for DAC loading is so inconsistent that it’s unusable for color cycling; direct loading through the I/O ports is the only way to go. We’ll see why next, as we explore color cycling, and then finish up this chapter and this section by cleaning up some odds and ends about VGA color.

There’s a lot to be said about loading the DAC, so let’s dive right in and see where the complications lie.

### Color Cycling

As we’ve learned in past chapters, the VGA’s DAC contains 256 storage locations, each holding one 18-bit value representing an RGB color triplet organized as 6 bits per primary color. Each and every pixel generated by the VGA is fed into the DAC as an 8-bit value (refer to Chapter 33 and to Chapter A on the companion CD-ROM to see how pixels become 8-bit values in non-256 color modes) and each 8-bit value is used to look up one of the 256 values stored in the DAC. The looked-up value is then converted to analog red, green, and blue signals and sent to the monitor to form one pixel.

That’s straightforward enough, and we’ve produced some pretty impressive color effects by loading the DAC once and then playing with the 8-bit path into the DAC. Now, however, we want to generate color effects by dynamically changing the values stored in the DAC in real time, a technique that I’ll call color cycling. The potential of color cycling should be obvious: Smooth motion can easily be simulated by altering the colors in an appropriate pattern, and all sorts of changing color effects can be produced without altering a single bit of display memory.

For example, a sunset can be made to color and darken by altering the DAC locations containing the colors used to draw the sunset, or a river can be made to appear to flow by cycling through the colors used to draw the river. Another use for color cycling is in providing more realistic displays for applications like realtime 3-D games, where the VGA’s 256 simultaneous colors can be made to seem like many more by changing the DAC settings from frame to frame to match the changing color demands of the rendered scene. Which leaves only one question: How do we load the DAC smoothly in realtime?

Actually, so far as I know, you can’t. At least you can’t load the entire DAC—all 256 locations—frame after frame without producing distressing on-screen effects on at least some computers. In non-256 color modes, it is indeed possible to load the DAC quickly enough to cycle all displayed colors (of which there are 16 or fewer), so color cycling could be used successfully to cycle all colors in such modes. On the other hand, color paging (which flips among a number of color sets stored within the DAC in all modes other than 256 color mode, as discussed in Chapter A on the companion CD-ROM) can be used in non-256 color modes to produce many of the same effects as color cycling and is considerably simpler and more reliable then color cycling, so color paging is generally superior to color cycling whenever it’s available. In short, color cycling is really the method of choice for dynamic color effects only in 256-color mode—but, regrettably, color cycling is at its least reliable and capable in that mode, as we’ll see next.

### The Heart of the Problem

Here’s the problem with loading the entire DAC repeatedly: The DAC contains 256 color storage locations, each loaded via either 3 or 4 OUT instructions (more on that next), so at least 768 OUTs are needed to load the entire DAC. That many OUTs take a considerable amount of time, all the more so because OUTs are painfully slow on 486s and Pentiums, and because the DAC is frequently on the ISA bus (although VLB and PCI are increasingly common), where wait states are inserted in fast computers. In an 8 MHz AT, 768 OUTs alone would take 288 microseconds, and the data loading and looping that are also required would take in the ballpark of 1,800 microseconds more, for a minimum of 2 milliseconds total.

As it happens, the DAC should only be loaded during vertical blanking; that is, the time between the end of displaying the bottom border and the start of displaying the top border, when no video information at all is being sent to the screen by the DAC. Otherwise, small dots of snow appear on the screen, and while an occasional dot of this sort wouldn’t be a problem, the constant DAC loading required by color cycling would produce a veritable snowstorm on the screen. By the way, I do mean “border,” not “frame buffer”; the overscan pixels pass through the DAC just like the pixels controlled by the frame buffer, so you can’t even load the DAC while the border color is being displayed without getting snow.

The start of vertical blanking itself is not easy to find, but the leading edge of the vertical sync pulse is easy to detect via bit 3 of the Input Status 1 register at 3DAH; when bit 3 is 1, the vertical sync pulse is active. Conveniently, the vertical sync pulse starts partway through but not too far into vertical blanking, so it serves as a handy way to tell when it’s safe to load the DAC without producing snow on the screen.

So we wait for the start of the vertical sync pulse, then begin to load the DAC. There’s a catch, though. On many computers—Pentiums, 486s, and 386s sometimes, 286s most of the time, and 8088s all the time—there just isn’t enough time between the start of the vertical sync pulse and the end of vertical blanking to load all 256 DAC locations. That’s the crux of the problem with the DAC, and shortly we’ll get to a tool that will let you explore for yourself the extent of the problem on computers in which you’re interested. First, though, we must address another DAC loading problem: the BIOS.

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Graphics Programming Black Book © 2001 Michael Abrash