vincThis weekend, I learned how to switch from VGA text mode to graphics mode without rebooting my OS to display a picture by writing it to the VGA framebuffer. It was really fun to play with pixels! #osdev #rust #rustlang #buildinpublic #hackathon
I tried to display a picture of a path in the woods on the screen. At first I could barely see the shapes of the trees:
It took me a while to understand how to work with the 256-colors VGA palette, both on GIMP on the host system to produce the right image and in my OS to load the palette, but after a while I got it:
Then I switched from PPM to BMP files that can embed their own custom palette and finally got this beautiful picture on real hardware:
The rest of the weekend was spent refactoring the driver, creating more images and coding a program to cycle between them. Next I will make the device files required to do that from userspace, and it will be one more step closer to porting DOOM to MOROS!