[2mlWQbCK]

One thing that made an impression on me when reading the 1991 Blue Book About GW-BASIC (1991) earlier this year was the chapter on making a text-mode user interface, that recommended drawing a characters+attributes interface 80x25 using an external editor, save that as a raw 4 kB file, and then from the BASIC program just BLOAD the file straight into graphics memory to render the screen in one line.

Everything is so much easier when you have standardized hardware instead of layers upon layers of abstractions supporting all sorts of weird things, like we have to put up with this century.

https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic

[rerdavies]

It is, of course, a very simple system if you never plan to render anything that isn't an ASCII character, or a value in US dollars. Things get complicated pretty quickly in DOS/Windows world once you wander outside the ASCII character set range. And there are strange and wonderful things in EGA and VGA hardware (standard, non-standard, and outright genius-level hackery) that are ridiculously complicated that are hardly ever used if you are fortunate enough to be an American who never uses anything but DOS.