This is meant to be a short post to talk about some CGA idiosyncrasies and how you can bypass them.
My video library VGALIB now supports CGA in addition to VGA, EGA support is planned too. Adding VGA was simple and that’s why I did it first; VGA implements a 320×200 linear framebuffer. A linear framebuffer is one where each pixel is represented by a simple lookup and the pixels are contiguous in the memory region. The formula width*y + x is commonly used to perform linear buffer address resolution. It is because of this simplicity that I made the internal representation of images 8 bit linear buffers. Each pixel is represented by 1 byte that can hold 1 of 256 colors.