Very Computer

1. Console Graphics and Timing Events and Real Time programming

  My question has a few parts, and I am hoping someone can answer at
least some of them.  The basic goal of what I want to do is thus: I
want to be able to display an image to the screen a very precise
amount of time.  I obviously want to be able to define how long this
image should appear, it needs to be accurate to 1/30ths of a second,
and in most cases my choice will be somewhere between about 1/30th of
a second to about 2 seconds.  Then I want the image to go away.  As
soon as the image pops up, I want to begin timing how long it takes
for either a key on the keyboard to be pressed, or for a signal to
come in on the RS-232 port.  This timing needs to be acurate to the
millisecond range.  I expect most events to take anywhere from about
50ms to 2 seconds.  I want to be able to do this so that we can test
patients on Sparc Classics and LX's (and the occasional Sparc 10) (I'm
the sys. admin for the Cognitive Neuropsychology Science Dept. of
Johns Hopkins Univ.)

  The hardware will be Sparc Classics and LX's running Solaris 2.X.
When the machines are used for testing, no one will be running any
processes on them.  (They will be in a pretty much single user mode.
No inetd or anything like that.  There will be remotely mounted disks
but that's basically it.)  I figure the only way to do this would be
to do direct console graphics by copying a pixmap to the framebuffer.
(I have graphics routines to actually render the pixmap so that's not
part of my question).  Also, I figure that I will probably have to be
in real time mode.  That too shouldn't be a problem (I think)

  Now, my questions are the following.  Can anyone point me to sources
of programs written for Solaris 2.x (or 4.1.x that can be ported) that
do console graphics?  What about general books or sources of
information regarding console graphics programming?  And what about
real-time programming? (I find Answerbook a little less than helpful)
Is this idea even feasible?  Is there a better approach? (I thought
that trying to use openwin or X would definately not work).

  Thanks.  I hope my question is well enough phrased to be
comprehensible.

-dave reed

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