Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Walter C Moore

Wesley O Rupel

Anthony C Pisculli

Nathan P Myrvold

A method and system of displaying a pattern using a bitmap memory display which acomplishes an overall pattern display by writing to the display memory one copy of the pattern. The logical unit (LU) of the system's graphics adapter (GA) is then used to replicate the pattern throughout the bitmap memory with a reduced number of write operations from the central processing unit (CPU) to the GA.

Method and system for displaying patterns using a bitmap display

An improved method and system for updating a display bitmap with a character string in a given font is provided. Each character in the font is stored as a character bitmap. Each character comprises a contiguous set of virtual characters. A visible stack is created for each character string to be displayed in the display bitmap. For each character to be displayed, the visible stack contains a pointer to each of its virtual characters. The data in the visible stack is then processed to update efficiently the display bitmap. The display bitmap is updated column by column, each column being one byte side. For each byte in the column, the virtual characters that are to be displayed in that byte are combined to form an output byte that is output to the display bitmap. The combining is accomplished by special-purpose routines based on the number of virtual characters that are to be displayed in a particular column.

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Walter C Moore