14.3 Protected Mode and the Final Project

Advantages:

• Better memory management

  • Can allocate huge (multimegabyte) buffers for high color, high resolution images and other data.

  • Don't have to deal with 64K segment limitations.

• Better instructions

  • Take full advantage of advanced instructions.

  • Reference memory with any register or some combinations of registers.

• High color, high resolution graphics

  • Final projects look much nicer.

  • No need to manage or match palettes of only 16 or 256 colors.

• PModeLib

  • A big library with source code that provides memory allocation, sound, graphics, and networking functions.

Disadvantages:

• It's less familiar and more complex than real mode (hopefully this tutorial will make it more familiar).

• Doing hardware stuff will be slightly more difficult.

• Debugging will be much more difficult (the debugger is significantly harder to use than Turbo Debugger, and doesn't provide source-level debugging).