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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   3759 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 16, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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They crow about how it allows you to more efficiently write to the screen with few calls, and that seems possible in theory.

Planar (bit pane) video modes are actually about fast reads. Not for the CPU, but the hardware on a video card can read the data from multiple vram chips in parallel when outputting to a monitor. 320 x 200 x 4bits x 60Hz was a lot of bandwidth for 80s memory chips.

I kinda get your point, but it's orthogonal on how these bits are presented to CPU. You can use multiple chips without any of this color planes thing. Also, EGA also had 640x350x 4bits mode which would require >64 kb address space if not this trick. CGA which had less memory did not use color planes.

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