DIYbanter - View Single Post - Omndiagonal Serialization and Monitor Design

writes in article . com dated 15 Feb 2006 03:15:14 -0800:

What I want to do is build some wave files and display them on my Tek
541 oscilloscope to start with.. They will have x and y values between
the extremes of plus and minus 15 bits (+- 32,767) at CD audio rate
(44.1 kss) on the left and right audio channels. I will use Mathcad to
compute the values to be converted from digital to analog audio.

Apparantly you're re-inventing vector graphics.

Vector graphics were used in computing until the late 1980s. The main
advantage was that you don't need as much RAM for a high-res display,
because instead of keeping pixel colors in RAM you keep line segment
endpoints. When RAM got cheap, the bottom fell out of the vector graphics
market, and everybody went raster.

One problem I had with the Sanders Graphic-7 displays I used was that if I
displayed too much data at one time there was a visible flicker, because the
controller could only re-paint so fast. If you want a 60-Hz refresh rate
from your sound card, you can only display 683 lines at a time. I'm not
familiar with modern scopes, maybe yours doesn't require that high a rate to
avoid flicker.

Have fun building your prototype, it sounds like an interesting project.
But don't quit your day job.

When you get to the point where you want to display text, look for some free
"stroke fonts".

--Keith Lewis klewis {at} mitre.org
The above may not (yet) represent the opinions of my employer.