vectorbeam hardware

Hi,

   I'm messing around with programming a vector monitor directly. I'm not
very knowledgable about hardware, so I'm doing it all in software.
However, I've encountered a problem which could probably be answered by
knowing how vector game hardware works, and I assume there's a few people
that know about that sort of thing on this mailing list. :)

The question is: when drawing a line segment, how does one achieve a
smooth, perfectly straight, unbroken line between points? I can do it on
the vertical and horizontal axis, but when I want to draw a diagonal I
have to regulate the velocity of the beam myself. I do this by breaking
the line up into an arbitrary number of segments and plotting each point
incrementally according to y = mx + b.

This works, but unfortunately it's not very pretty. If I don't pause at
each point, I get little bends and curves in the line that make it look
sort of wiggly. If I do pause, it exhibits little breaks along its length
(which, I've noticed, look almost exactly like the vector lines in
Asteriods Deluxe).

Is there a trick to this that I'm missing? I've tried a large number of
different subdivisions and delay constants, none of which seem to make too
much of a difference.

Any insights would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Adam
Received on Thu Nov 25 03:11:37 1999