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That's super interesting. How did Harvard Graphics use smooth scrolling? I see that it smoothly animated some screen elements, but not a whole screen-filling ba

That's super interesting. How did Harvard Graphics use smooth scrolling? I see that it smoothly animated some screen elements, but not a whole screen-filling background ala Commander Keen. https://youtu.be/wwqm0zOivUU?t=1007 https://youtu.be/wwqm0zOivUU?t=1007 I'm not familiar with Harvard Graphics or EGA graphics details, so, might be a dumb question. As an aside, it's eternally hilarious to me that there were so many capabilities in the EGA/VGA chipsets that were "hidden." IBM clearly spent a lot of engineering time (and die space!) implementing them... and then it still took ages for them to be "discovered." Did IBM just neglect to promote them to developers? Or did they intentionally sort of bury those features so as not to be seen as having built a "game machine?" Always curious.

joakleaf 5y ago
In Harvard Graphics, I am pretty sure it was used with the "Scroll" transition in slide shows. That option is visible in at 15.34 in your video for the "Euromap.cht". As I remember, it only ran smoothly (i.e. used the smooth scrolling registers) in 640x350.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Ah. Thanks! Interesting!
syntheweave 5y ago
If you look at the software that was being put out in the mid-80s, there's a clear picture of "IBM being IBM" in that it had designed some graphics APIs that worked according to their corporate view of what applications needed[0]...and then the market ignored it, and programmed the hardware registers directly. And many of the features make sense in this light as being something designed to the APIs they had in mind, but then otherwise not given much attention or support. A critical part of Microsoft's rise in this era was in grabbing up pieces of market share that the competition had overlooked, and their graphics story with Windows definitely enters into this. GDI didn't have conflicts of interest from being both a hardware and software maker, and so it could focus just on compatibility - a classic example of "worse is better". [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Data_Display_Manager https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Data_Display_Manag...

joakleaf 5y ago

In Harvard Graphics, I am pretty sure it was used with the "Scroll" transition in slide shows. That option is visible in at 15.34 in your video for the "Euromap.cht". As I remember, it only ran smoothly (i.e. used the smooth scrolling registers) in 640x350.

JohnBooty 5y ago
Ah. Thanks! Interesting!

syntheweave 5y ago

If you look at the software that was being put out in the mid-80s, there's a clear picture of "IBM being IBM" in that it had designed some graphics APIs that worked according to their corporate view of what applications needed[0]...and then the market ignored it, and programmed the hardware registers directly. And many of the features make sense in this light as being something designed to the APIs they had in mind, but then otherwise not given much attention or support. A critical part of Microsoft's rise in this era was in grabbing up pieces of market share that the competition had overlooked, and their graphics story with Windows definitely enters into this. GDI didn't have conflicts of interest from being both a hardware and software maker, and so it could focus just on compatibility - a classic example of "worse is better". [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Data_Display_Manager https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Data_Display_Manag...