I searched for similar questions here and none of them really gave the answer I’m looking for.
I understand we have the concept of encoding where in the ascii scheme, the letter A, for example, is encoded to 01000001, because humans agreed on this to be so, *but where actually is that A* when the binary calls for it, if physically in the cpu, for this example we just have 8 microscopic transistors, 2 holding a charge and 6 without a charge that we point to and say “That there means A…but it also means 65 in decimal”? Clearly there’s some level of abstraction here I’m not aware of.
Does 01000001 actually just correspond to a standardized pixel arrangement in the shape of A that is only actually rendered by the hardware in the situation where it’s called to be printed on a screen?
In: 0
yes, 01000001 is the only representation of A that there is in your cpu.
there is a font, which contains the shape of the letter A, so when it’s time to render 01000001 to the screen, the correct shape in the font is looked up and that’s drawn, according to the font rules for sizing, kerning, etc.
even back in the console days, screen data just had 01000001 in it. the graphics control chip knew where the CRT monitor’s beam was on the screen, determined which screen cell that was in memory, retrieved 01000001 as being the character in that cell, looked up the 8×8 pixel character in the font buffer, determined which pixel it was currently drawing in that character from the beam location, and turned the beam on if it was a lit pixel, and off if it was an unlit pixel.
if it was graphics mode instead of text mode, the pixels were rendered into memory directly, but the same font buffer was used to do so and the beam was coloured according to the current pixel from the graphics memory, so no real difference.
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