Over the period of a week of solid programming, often crashing the computer more than 50 times a day and going on into the small hours, in one school holiday I constructed an SVGA engine that was identical in function, and nearly twice the speed, of its lo-res counterpart. Every routine was written in thoroughly tested pure 32-bit assembly language. The routines made use of several look up tables and shortcuts, and employ most of the registers on the processor at a time. If one mistake was made the computer would usually crash spectacularly. The SVGA engine is identical in function to the MCGA code: using the same image format and buffer system, and the same virtual screen; but the complexity of the code, and the clarity of images it produces doubly repaid the effor required. Sadly, it has not yet had any (major) application, my fractal demos being the only example. Coding an effective SVGA engine from scratch is extremely difficult; if you can master my syntax for its use, but don't want to have to play with the graphics too much, I suggest you take advantage of it, available with full source. Graphical programming has been the one strain that has united my entire programming career: from when I used text graphics attempting to program with batch files, to the elegance of my modern SVGA engine. I hope you enjoy them, Jon.

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