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I think Notch is thinking the same thing: https://twitter.com/#!/notch/statuses/184933588754628609

I'm guessing it's 80x25, 2000 words starting at 0x8000, high byte is the attribute and low byte is the character. Just like a CGA/EGA/VGA display (except that started at 0xA0000). But it's sort of silly to speculate at such an early stage; for instance, is this emulated on the server? client? both, kept in sync somehow? If on the server, do you have to constantly send framebuffer updates?



Since it's text I would have started it at 0xB000 I think it was. That's where I believe the text mode on old XT/AT systems used to pull it from. It's been way too long since I've dealt with that for me to remember properly


Oh yeah. 0xB8000. (You'd use a segmented address of 0xB800:0000, but the "segment" part that would be in 16-byte "paragraphs", so the logical "flat" address was equivalent to 0xB8000).


That was it! Boy does that bring back memories. Some bad ones, some good ones.

I can only imagine how fast putting text on the screen can be if you did it with some of the vector instructions in a modern processor....




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