4 ms·
It was also about speed. For example, going through BIOS for video was slooooow, so most everyone went straight to the hardware, which buggered up anything tha
by kjs3 7y ago
It was also about speed. For example, going through BIOS for video was slooooow, so most everyone went straight to the hardware, which buggered up anything that wasn't an MDA/CGA/EGA/VGA video adapter or near identical (like those with a NEC 7220...there were one or two). It meant things like the Wyse 700 (high-res mono video adapter) had to have application specific drivers.
- skissane 7y agoIn theory, they should have written to MS-DOS API, and then if BIOS video is slow, Microsoft (or OEMs) could have changed the MS-DOS console device driver to use direct hardware access. The problem was, everyone just went straight to the hardware so there was little impetus on anyone to write a faster console device driver for MS-DOS.
- abecedarius 7y agoIirc the bios interface was inherently slow: output was a character at a time, one bios call each. It’s been a long time, though.