One fundamental difference between the XGA and 8514/A drivers is that the XGA refers to objects in VRAM by their address as a pixmap and the 8514/A refers to them by an X-Y coordinate. Further, monochrome data on the 8514/A can be stored not only by an X-Y coordinate but by planes as well. For instance, at 8 bits-per-pel, a 20 x 20 area of the display could hold one 20 x 20 8-bit-per-pel bit map, or eight 20 x 20 1-bit-per-pel bit maps.

Another difference between the XGA and 8514/A drivers is that on the XGA display driver, a pixmap may have any pitch at all, while on the 8514/A, the pitch of a rectangle in VRAM is always the same as the length of a scanline. In effect, the 8514/A has only one pixmap that occupies all of VRAM.

Given that the XGA uses memory addresses to refer to objects in VRAM, the 8514/A refers to them by using an artificial address in VRAM, which is created from the X-Y coordinates. It then is marked so it can be distinguished from a system-memory bit map. The address of a bit map in VRAM for the original 8514/A driver is as follows:

        address = 0f0000000h or (y-coord * 1024 + x-coord)

The 0f0000000h is a special VRAM marker. Any of the lower-level routines that can work with either system or VRAM bit maps, look at the bit-map address, and if the high-order nibble is 0fh, then they know that address refers to VRAM. To convert the address back to X-Y coordinates, the calc8514xy macro is called. This macro logically ANDs the address with 0fffffffh, and divides by 1024, which yields an X-Y coordinate.

The S3 driver creates addresses in VRAM out of X-Y coordinates as follows:

        address = 0f0000000h or (y-coord * 65536 + x-coord)

This is a more efficient computation for the assembler-language portions of the driver to perform.