From:	Brian Osman <osmanb AT rpi DOT edu>
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: Help improving function sped needed.
Date:	Tue, 18 Feb 1997 17:48:43 -0500
Organization:	Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY, USA
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Message-ID:	<330A31CB.28CB@rpi.edu>
References:	<5eccbc$f31 AT lion DOT cs DOT latrobe DOT edu DOT au>
Reply-To:	osmanb AT rpi DOT edu
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CC:	boylesgj AT lion DOT cs DOT latrobe DOT edu DOT au
To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway:	from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

Hello,
I just read the post about the direct acces windowing system.
I have one idea, though I didn't read the source code entirely,
so I may something really stupid. Try redefining the idea of
a string. (Like XWindows does.)

Internally, store your strings as:

[Char][Attrib][Char][Attrib]...

It takes two bytes instead of one for all storage, but memory
is cheap. This way, when you want to write, you can do things
like memcpy() to simply transfer the entire string to video
memory. As for clipping and word wrapping, do a little while
loop: (pseudocode)

n = length(str)
while (n > WindowWidth){
	use memcopy to move WindowWidth characters to vid mem
	increment row index.
}

This would require writing a few basic functions to go between
the two formats, but it shouldn't be hard, and those would be
easy to write so that they are very fast. For example, to
convert a normal string to an "attrib'd string" you could try
something like:
for every character in string
	NewString[i] = (attrib << 8) & (OldString[i]);

There are probably some serious problems in my logic, as I just
made this up. Still, this may have potential. Oh well, good luck,

Brian

P.S. I worked a little on something like this in Pascal years ago,
but I never got nearly this advanced (ie no real Windowing.)

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