How To Write to the Display a quick nnansi tutorial The purpose of this tutorial is to illustrate the various ways programs can write to the display
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| How To Write to the Display A quick NNANSI tutorial The purpose of this tutorial is to illustrate the various ways programs can write to the display. There are several parts to this puzzle: DISPLAY MEMORY -- memory mapped video, can be accessed directly by applications, but there are drawbacks. VIDEO BIOS -- "Low level" access to write characters, position the cursor, change display modes. DOS INT 21H SERVICES -- Access display in a device independent manner. The display (and keyboard) are device "CON". Devices can be accessed in "Cooked" mode, in which the keyboard is monitored for ^C and other control characters and certain character translations may occur, or in "Raw", or binary, mode, which does no translation and is potentially much faster. In Cooked mode when the output device is the display, single characters are written using calls to INT 29H. In Raw mode, or for other devices, DOS calls the driver, which is a cumbersome process, but allows writing of multiple characters. INT 29H HANDLER -- writes a single character to the display. By default (no ANSI driver) it is a simple call to the video BIOS. CON DRIVER -- The console device. Called by DOS and in turn calls the video BIOS to write characters. ANSI DRIVER -- A replacement for the default CON driver which provides interpretation of ANSI control codes. Also overrides the "INT 29H" handler to interpret ANSI codes. The driver typically calls the VIDEO BIOS for all functions, but fast drivers like NNANSI do most of the low level operations internally. NNANSI has additional features which will be discussed throughout this tutorial. *************Writing Direct to Display*********************** Most program originally used DOS calls to write to the display. But poor performance of DOS and the ANSI.SYS driver led many programmers to bypass the operating system and write directly to the display. The standardization of displays hastened the change, and made "PC-Compatible" the important issue rather than just "MS-DOS operating system". Programs that use this technique typically (but not always) use the video BIOS for moving the cursor and clearing the display. This is potentially the fastest technique, and is employed by high level languages which provide a fast console output. There are several problems with direct output, however. The video BIOS maintains information about the display in low memory. This information includes the number of rows and columns, as well as the display memory start address. Many programs using direct display writing ignore the row and column information. This typically means only the top of the display is utilized (typically 43/50 line modes) or the display is garbled (typically 132 column modes). Most programs ignore the display start address. This can cause problems in two ways. Some applications use "display pages". When display pages are in use, the display memory gets divided into several screens that can be switched back and forth by a single BIOS command. Programs that ignore the start address always write to page 0, possibly clobering the display. NNANSI modifies the start address to implement FAST scrolling. It attempts to accomodate direct to display programs by reseting the offset when a program calls the BIOS to either clear the screen or get the display mode. Programs that do neither of these, or write to the display after the display has scrolled, will not work with NNANSI in FAST mode. There is another problem with writing the display directly -- you cannot redirect output to a file, or more important, to a serial port for remote operation. The program is locked into the display and is not portable to other computers or even other PC operating systems. ************Using the Video BIOS******************* Again, standardization of the video BIOS made it possible to write programs using BIOS calls to write to the display. Because of the cumbersome interface, few programs actually use BIOS calls to write to the display. But in the absence of an ANSI driver, BIOS calls are necessary to read or position the cursor or clear the display in programs that otherwise use the DOS INT 21H interface. The BIOS provides a "TTY Write" function which allows writing character strings, but does not allow controling the color, and does not expand tab characters. NNANSI has an option to do ANSI processing of this BIOS call which will allow setting the color and expanding tabs. To set the colors using BIOS calls is a messy process because the only call that writes the character attribute information does not advance the cursor! One advantage of using the Video BIOS for writing is that the BIOS always know how to handle the various display modes the video adapter is capable of handling. It will always correctly write in 132 column or 50 line modes, for example. **********DOS INT 21H Services********************** DOS provides numerious functions for accessing the display (and keyboard) without much difference in functionality. Most of the functions are for compatibility with the archaic CP/M operating system. We will only consider the "handle" interface, which allows treating the console (keyboard and display) as a file. You can open, read, write, and close the console "file". All programs start execution with three appropriate handles. Handle 0 (corresponding to the C language stdin) and Handle 1 (corresponding to the C language stdout) are the console unless redirected on the command line with the "<" or ">" operators. Handle 2 (corresponding to the C language stderr) is always (well, almost always) the console. Unless redirection is in effect, any of the three handles can be used interchangably. Normally, the console device is in "cooked" mode. In cooked mode, tab characters are expanded, and the keyboard is checked with each character written for control-C, control-S, and control-P keystrokes. On input, these keystrokes are not readable, nor is control-Z which forces the end of file condition. Programs using cooked mode DOS INT 21H services to write to the display are very portable, but slow. In fact this is the slowest way to write to the display. In addition, without an ANSI driver loaded, there is no way to enquire or set the cursor position, change colors or other display attributes, or clear the display. *********ANSI Drivers******************************** To make using DOS INT 21H services more palatable, an ANSI driver can be loaded. With an ANSI driver the program gains the following abilities: 1. Change display mode (some drivers allow extended modes) 2. Clear screen (some drivers allow line clearing, and inserting/deleting characters and lines) 3. Set cursor position 4. Get cursor position -- cumbersome to use, and not available with some drivers such as ANSI.COM and NNANSI as limited function TSR 5. Change character attributes When an ANSI driver is used, the program is portable to any system that supports ANSI display codes, including DEC VT-100 and later terminals, and most programs can be run remotely out the COM port using the CTTY command. *********Using INT 29H******************************* This interrupt will always write the character in register AL to the display. The DOS INT 21H services use this interrupt to write characters when the console is in Cooked mode. Since the keyboard check is bypassed, INT 29H is a significantly faster way to write to the display. When an ANSI driver is loaded, ANSI processing will occur, but tabs will not be expanded unless NNANSI or some other extended ANSI driver is used. *********Using RAW Mode****************************** All the previous techniques only write a single character at a time. A major speed advantage can be gained by using DOS INT21H services with the console in Raw mode, and by buffering up the characters to write. In this manner, the ANSI driver gets all the characters to write at once and overhead is vastly reduced. The NANSI driver, and its derivatives, such as NNANSI, are particularly enhanced this way, and will often outperform high level language's "console" drivers. Using raw mode will also prevent DOS from intercepting typed control characters during printing, which is often an advantage. Note however that tab expansion will not occur with standard ANSI drivers. The application needs to expand tabs unless it can be assured the system is using an enhanced ANSI driver, such as NNANSI. Directory: ~dank ~dank -> Nansi. Sys an Enhanced ms-dos console Driver Version 3 November 1991 Introduction Who should use nansi. Sys is a console device driver for ms-dos computers ~dank -> Weather response to management of a large wind turbine array Download 9.17 Kb. Share with your friends:
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