I've been asked to explain the video model above to peopel whose
only experence with Video is the 'at-arms-length" thinsg you do
with AWT. First, forget about AWT., We are going aroudn it here
and for very good reasons. AWT gives you niether the performance
nor the control necessary for cutting edge games. I'm going to
start by explaing the Full Screen buffer flipping model and
then, by extension, will talk about the windowed mode version.
Your graphics card has a big hunk of RAM on it. Only a small
part of that RAM is displayed on screen at any given time. Which
part is displayed is controlled by something called the "video
pointer." The video pointer points at the memory for the first
pixel on your screen. (Usually the top left one in order to
match the right-to-left and top-to-bottom way video monitors
scan out pixels. Otehr mreo complex hardware designs are
possible though where the system corrects for the mismatch when
displaying video by doing things like starting at the last pixel
and scanning backward