Hands-on graphics without X11 - by Julio Merino
Same font, same colors, same… everything? Other than for the actual text they display, they look identical, don’t they? But the one on the right can do things that the one on the left cannot. Witness this:
A square? OK, meh, we had those in the DOS days with box-drawing characters. But a circle?! That’s only possible because the console on the right is a hybrid console that supports mixing the usual textual grid of a terminal with overlapping graphics.
Now, if you have been following the development of EndBASIC, this is not surprising. The defining characteristic of the EndBASIC console is that it’s hybrid as the video shows. What’s newsworthy, however, is that the EndBASIC console can now run directly on a framebuffer exposed by the kernel. No X11 nor Wayland in the picture (pun intended).
But how? The answer lies in NetBSD’s flexible wscons framework, and this article dives into what it takes to render graphics on a standard Unix system. I’ve found this exercise exciting because, in the old days, graphics were trivial ( mode 13h, anyone?) and, for many years now, computers use framebuffer-backed textual consoles. The kernel is obviously rendering “graphics” by drawing individual letters; so why can’t you, a user of the system, do so too?
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