Chapter 4 Display Driver Environment

Part 1 of this document described general graphics driver design and implementation that applies to both printer and display drivers. Topics included initialization and termination, graphics output (line and path drawing, painting, and bitmap copying), and color, pattern, font, and text functions. Display driver writers should read Part 1 before proceeding with this part, which is Part 2.

Part 2 focuses on how a display driver operates, and describes issues specific to display driver design. Part 2 also provides guidelines for video miniport driver design.

This chapter of Part 2 covers the following subjects:

·An overview of the graphics display driver.

·Types of video display adapters.

·Display driver design and implementation strategies.

·The hardware interface.

The Windows NT DDK includes sample display drivers that support several standard video adapter cards. This chapter refers to some of those sample drivers.