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Four-pixel-wide patterns are more useful than you might imagine. There are actually 2128 possible patterns (16 pixels, each with 28 possible colors); that set is certainly large enough for most color-dithering purposes, and includes many often-used patterns, such as halftones, diagonal stripes, and crosshatches.

Furthermore, eight-wide patterns, which are widely used, can be drawn with two passes, one for each half of the pattern. This principle can in fact be extended to patterns of arbitrary multiple-of-four widths. (Widths that aren’t multiples of four are considerably more difficult to handle, because the latches are four pixels wide; one possible solution is expanding such patterns via repetition until they are multiple-of-four widths.)

### Allocating Memory in Mode X

Listing 48.2 raises some interesting questions about the allocation of display memory in Mode X. In Listing 48.2, whenever a pattern is to be drawn, that pattern is first drawn in its entirety at the very end of display memory; the latches are then loaded from that copy of the pattern before each scan line of the actual fill is drawn. Why this double copying process, and why is the pattern stored in that particular area of display memory?

The double copying process is used because it’s the easiest way to load the latches. Remember, there’s no way to get information directly from the CPU to the latches; the information must first be written to some location in display memory, because the latches can be loaded only from display memory. By writing the pattern to off-screen memory, we don’t have to worry about interfering with whatever is currently displayed on the screen.

As for why the pattern is stored exactly where it is, that’s part of a master memory allocation plan that will come to fruition in the next chapter, when I implement a Mode X animation program. Figure 48.3 shows this master plan; the first two pages of memory (each 76,800 pixels long, spanning 19,200 addresses—that is, 19,200 pixel quadruplets—in display memory) are reserved for page flipping, the next page of memory (also 76,800 pixels long) is reserved for storing the background (which is used to restore the holes left after images move), the last 16 pixels (four addresses) of display memory are reserved for the pattern buffer, and the remaining 31,728 pixels (7,932 addresses) of display memory are free for storage of icons, images, temporary buffers, or whatever.

Figure 48.3 A useful Mode X display memory layout.

This is an efficient organization for animation, but there are certainly many other possible setups. For example, you might choose to have a solid-colored background, in which case you could dispense with the background page (instead using the solid rectangle fill routine to replace the background after images move), freeing up another 76,800 pixels of off-screen storage for images and buffers. You could even eliminate page-flipping altogether if you needed to free up a great deal of display memory. For example, with enough free display memory it is possible in Mode X to create a virtual bitmap three times larger than the screen, with the screen becoming a scrolling window onto that larger bitmap. This technique has been used to good effect in a number of animated games, with and without the use of Mode X.

### Copying Pixel Blocks within Display Memory

Another fine use for the latches is copying pixels from one place in display memory to another. Whenever both the source and the destination share the same nibble alignment (that is, their start addresses modulo four are the same), it is not only possible but quite easy to use the latches to copy four pixels at a time. Listing 48.3 shows a routine that copies via the latches. (When the source and destination do not share the same nibble alignment, the latches cannot be used because the source and destination planes for any given pixel differ. In that case, you can set the Read Map register to select a source plane and the Map Mask register to select the corresponding destination plane. Then, copy all pixels in that plane, repeating for all four planes.)

| Although copying through the latches is, in general, a speedy technique, especially on slower VGAs, it’s not always a win. Reading video memory tends to be quite a bit slower than writing, and on a fast VLB or PCI adapter, it can be faster to copy from main memory to display memory than it is to copy from display memory to display memory via the latches.

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Graphics Programming Black Book © 2001 Michael Abrash