Programmer's Guide to the EGA and VGA Cards - book

[FishFinger]

Does anyone have the book "Programmer's Guide to the EGA and VGA Cards" by Richard Ferraro?

I was thinking of picking up a copy but wanted an idea of the sort of things it covered, as I'd rather not spent £15 if it's just going to be 1000 pages of mode 13h/mode X stuff and nothing else - as many VGA programming books/websites seem to be.

 

[deathshadow]

I've owned the book for years to the point my original copy was falling apart, so I ended up getting another one.

The entire first half of the book covers the internals of the EGA/VGA cards including fully documenting every bit in every register you'd ever need to access. This is 99% of why I own the book. The next few sections give you code examples not just of mode 13h (which a sweetly retarded rhesis monkey on crack could program) but also the 16 color modes -- it also does a great job covering line and circle drawing algorythms in a non-mode specific manner... The last few chapters in the book cover how to directly access the vendor specific SVGA implementations that came out before VESA was added to cards, as well as the VESA modes.

The crtc/palette/control register documentation ALONE is worth the price.