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by setquk 2689 days ago
Gah I hate these bloody awful displays. You find out regularly that the display's memory isn't organised how you think (linearly) because the early displays were tiny, so writing say a line out on a 40x4 display turns into a nightmare.

The positive bit is once you've hidden all the oddness behind an API (mine is lcd_init(), lcd_cls(), lcd_pos(x,y), lcd_write(str) ) then they're totally fungible.

1 comments

I think it's because bigger displays consist of multiple controllers, handling different sections of the display. (at the bottom, there should usually be 2 chips, but for bigger displays there are 3) So you have to address these separately.

But nothing really weird.

You're 100% right but it's very inconvenient to use. For example if you want to copy a buffer to the display you have to track the position and then execute commands to move the cursor to the new region.

Less of a problem now in C but back in the day, Z80 asm / PIC asm it was a PITA.