Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!ucsd!ucbvax!pasteur!mars.Berkeley.EDU!dean
From: dean@mars.Berkeley.EDU (R. Drew Dean)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Text Drawing at speeds in excess of 1200baud
Message-ID: <9000@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 23 Jan 89 05:06:55 GMT
References: <2220@uokmax.UUCP> <568029@vaxa.uwa.oz>
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Reply-To: dean@xcssun.Berkeley.EDU (R. Drew Dean)
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 25

In article <568029@vaxa.uwa.oz> d_volaric@vaxa.uwa.oz writes:
>I don't know if you are doing so already, but I would buffer the text coming
>from the serial port and then use DrawText to draw a bunch of characters
>at the same time. I doubt whether DrawText of say, 10 characters is slower
>that 10 characters at 2400 baud. I would check the buffer every few ticks
...
>Darko "Yes, it is my real name" Volaric

There's one problem with this approach: it's ugly. (As first pointed out
to me by a friend, when I suggested the same thing :-))  If you want to
see what it looks like, check out Miniterm (I have version 2.9.1) at 2400
baud.  You'll see it jerk.  Then look at VersaTerm.  It's smooth, just like
a real VT-100 is.  I realize that it's probably not necessary to draw each
character one at a time as they come in, but DrawText needs to be called
with a small (ie. 2 or 3) number of characters each time, if you want the
text to flow smoothly.
Note that the MicroPhone II I saw (it wasn't 3.0, so things may be better
now), drew text a _line_ at a time at 2400 baud.  Personally, I didn't like
the effect. 


Drew Dean
Internet: dean@xcssun.berkeley.edu
UUCP: ...!ucbvax!xcssun!dean
FROM Disclaimers IMPORT StandardDisclaimer;