Zen of Graphics Programming: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Fast PC Graphics

by Michael Abrash

Includes easy-to-follow techniques for programming leading-edge graphics including texture mapping, 3D animation, hidden surface removal, antialiasing, 3D shading, color modeling, and much more. Features a complete 3D, 256-color animation library you can use today to create amazing applications from games to virtual worlds to anything else your imagination will lead you to. Provides thousands of lines of C and assembly source code ready to drop into applications. Gives you the best high-level and low-level graphics programming advice and tips from the acknowledged master of PC graphics. Includes secrets of VGA programming you won't find anywhere else--ModeX, page flipping, color DACs, memory maps, palette animation, and 256-color modes.

Genres: Programming

750 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 1994

Reviews

[Lucas · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is some good material here, but the origins of each chapter in magazine articles make it not very well integrated (The magazine paid by the word? Which would explain why this is 600 pages long and contains tons of redundant source code).

Many times a table would have explained what several options are good for but instead there is a verbal description of four or five slightly different cases.

All the examples are in assembly language, which means a lot of simple things like setting a register to a certain value are hidden within multiple lines of assembly code to accomplish the same.

I only read the articles about VGA programming, there are many chapters on different graphics modes but not much over-arching description of how they all fit together. I did spend a little time compiling some c for use in dosbox (https://gist.github.com/lucasw/eb0d8c... needs to get filled out with some additional information and code I put into an email to myself), but there were discrepancies between online sources and what dosbox was allowing me to do I haven't accounted for.

Any screenshots at all would have been helpful, as would more diagrams.

It's pretty hard to find good vga programming information (one source is http://www.brackeen.com/vga/ )- a lot of books were published in the 1990's prior to the internet taking pre-eminence as a source of programming information. I really want a good description of what the hardware is doing, even for just a single variety of graphics card- though I haven't looked that hard. Even better would be explanation of why the design is like it is (backwards compatibility with CGA/EGA and hardware limitations probably), though it's more understandable the old books wouldn't have this.