Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1997 18:33:17 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Andrew Cottrell <acottrel AT magna DOT com DOT au>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: PDCurses or Conio?
In-Reply-To: <32ec6116.127937@203.4.212.50>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970203182829.27257I-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII


On Mon, 27 Jan 1997, Andrew Cottrell wrote:

> What package PDCURSES 2.2 or standard CONIO windowing has the faster
> screen updates? 

I think PDCurses is slower than raw conio, because it does more testing 
and uses the same techniques.  But I didn't actually test that, so I 
might be wrong.

> Does CONIO have to switch to real (slow) mode to do the screen draw?
> Does PDCURSES update the screen in protected mode?

Both write directly to the video RAM, but sometimes they must call real-mode 
BIOS functions, e.g. to see where is the cursor, or what is the current 
video mode.

I suggest you profile your program to see which conio functions eat up
most of the cycles, then try to avoid calling those functions as much as
you can (there's more than one way to do those things).  If you only need
to write simple strings to the screen, you might consider using
ScreenUpdateLine library functions instead of cputs or outtext from conio.