11-16-2022, 01:00 AM
@james2464 Lots of questions which are bleeding off into a lot of other keywords and all! Let me cover them here briefly, and if you have further questions, let's move the discussion for those other keywords elsewhere so as to not completely overwhelm this poor topic which should just be for _PUTIMAGE. 
Hardware images are basically completed screens that you send to your GPU to draw and render for you. They display for a single frame when _DISPLAY is called, and then they're gone. You can't edit them, change them, or do anything else with them, except just display them -- which is why they're so fast compared to software images. There's no such thing as PRINT displaying text on your hardware image. Hardware images are set in stone -- when you copy them, that's what they are! Forever and ever more!!
Software images are the screens that you're working on in the CPU. They're easy to manipulate and change. Print to them. Draw on them. Use Circle, Line, and PSET on them. These are the screens that you've always used, so you should be used to using them. They're malleable and easy to work with.
One important thing to keep in mind -- THE TWO SCREENS ARE COMPLETELY UNRELATED!! What you do with one has zero bearing with what happens to the other.
In fact.... dun dun de dun...
You can use hardware images with SCREEN 0 software screens! Overlay graphics over text screens! Who'da thunk it?
Since we now know a little about the screens, let's briefly hit on _DISPLAYORDER.
_DISPLAYORDER simply sets the order in which we layer our screens. Take a RED software screen, and a BLUE hardware screen. If both are solid colors, and they perfectly overlap each other, which one are we going to see displayed on our monitor?
To make this easy to understand and visualize, get two pieces of paper and write RED on one and BLUE on the other.
Put the RED (software) paper on the bottom, and the BLUE (hardware) page on top of it. Which can you see? The BLUE page! This is _DISPLAYORDER _SOFTWARE, _HARDWARE.
Now, pick those pieces of paper back up and put the BLUE (hardware) page down first, and then lay the RED (software) page on top of it. What can you see? The RED page! That's basically _DISPLAYORDER _HARDWARE, _SOFTWARE.
Now, pick those pages up once more, and this time you're going to toss the RED page completely away. Put the BLUE page down and what do you see? GASP!! The BLUE page!! That's what you get with just _DISPLAYORDER _HARDWARE.
_DISPLAYORDER basically just sets the order with which you stack those independent pages/screens on top of each other.
As for _DISPLAY, it basically just tells your program to sync up all your available pages and draw them all together, layered in the order you specified with _DISPLAYORDER.
And _FREEIMAGE, like always, should be used once you're finished with *any* image, to keep it from using up precious memory on your PC. (And maybe eventually leading to a program crash for "out of memory" glitches.)
Hardware images are basically completed screens that you send to your GPU to draw and render for you. They display for a single frame when _DISPLAY is called, and then they're gone. You can't edit them, change them, or do anything else with them, except just display them -- which is why they're so fast compared to software images. There's no such thing as PRINT displaying text on your hardware image. Hardware images are set in stone -- when you copy them, that's what they are! Forever and ever more!!
Software images are the screens that you're working on in the CPU. They're easy to manipulate and change. Print to them. Draw on them. Use Circle, Line, and PSET on them. These are the screens that you've always used, so you should be used to using them. They're malleable and easy to work with.
One important thing to keep in mind -- THE TWO SCREENS ARE COMPLETELY UNRELATED!! What you do with one has zero bearing with what happens to the other.
In fact.... dun dun de dun...
You can use hardware images with SCREEN 0 software screens! Overlay graphics over text screens! Who'da thunk it?
Since we now know a little about the screens, let's briefly hit on _DISPLAYORDER.
_DISPLAYORDER simply sets the order in which we layer our screens. Take a RED software screen, and a BLUE hardware screen. If both are solid colors, and they perfectly overlap each other, which one are we going to see displayed on our monitor?
To make this easy to understand and visualize, get two pieces of paper and write RED on one and BLUE on the other.
Put the RED (software) paper on the bottom, and the BLUE (hardware) page on top of it. Which can you see? The BLUE page! This is _DISPLAYORDER _SOFTWARE, _HARDWARE.
Now, pick those pieces of paper back up and put the BLUE (hardware) page down first, and then lay the RED (software) page on top of it. What can you see? The RED page! That's basically _DISPLAYORDER _HARDWARE, _SOFTWARE.
Now, pick those pages up once more, and this time you're going to toss the RED page completely away. Put the BLUE page down and what do you see? GASP!! The BLUE page!! That's what you get with just _DISPLAYORDER _HARDWARE.
_DISPLAYORDER basically just sets the order with which you stack those independent pages/screens on top of each other.
As for _DISPLAY, it basically just tells your program to sync up all your available pages and draw them all together, layered in the order you specified with _DISPLAYORDER.
And _FREEIMAGE, like always, should be used once you're finished with *any* image, to keep it from using up precious memory on your PC. (And maybe eventually leading to a program crash for "out of memory" glitches.)