high resolution colour graphics card (part 1) - the first in a series of articles describing a 512 x 12 or 12 x 256 pixel, black & white or colour graphics card, complete with software

elektor electronics september 1985 1 high-resolution colour graphics card the first in a series of articles describing a 512x512 or 512x256 pixel, black & white or colour graphics card, complete with software P Lavigne & D Meyer ASCII is the acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange; it is a 7-bit code that gives 128 unique combinations or characters, of which 32 are reserved for special control functions. pixel is short for picture el- ement; it is also called a pel or a dot Table 1. Technical characteristics of the graphics card. Basically, a graphics card is an autonomous terminal that generates graphic video images based on instruc- tions received and decoded by the soft- ware. In a sense, it is similar to a printer receiving ASCII codes and converting these into control signals for driving its print head. The difference between a printer or x-y plotter and a graphics card is that the latter does not need a separate CPU to interpret the instructions, since...