alt Hacker NewsAt the end of the day it's always pixels - alway has been [1] - and the efficiency of storing and blitting a small number of fixed size rectangles is hard to beat if you can get away with it.
[1] Except for the early oscilloscope style vector displays maybe.
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orbital-decay • yesterday at 8:20 PM
Character-based hardware only stores the characters and the grid instead of the full bitmap for the frame, which is very efficient memory-wise. Tile-based hardware (e.g. most console graphics chips in the 8/16 bit era) also had scrolling and layers, and was extremely memory-efficient as well. With bitmap displays you already store full frames.
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No, this is technically not fully correct. Early text based display output systems were relying on special character generator hardware to generate the display signals producing the text on screen. Those systems did not have any means of generating arbitrary pixel patterns.