title: Drawing pixel by pixel in C++
body: <p>Some years ago, I used to program for MS-DOS in assembly language.  One the things available was to tell the BIOS an <code>x</code> coordinate, a <code>y</code> coordinate and a color (expressed as an integer) then call a function and the BIOS would do it immediately.</p>
  
  <p>Of course, this is very hard work and very time consuming but the trade off was that you got exactly what you want exactly at the time you wanted it.</p>
  
  <p>I tried for many years to write to MacOS API, but found it either difficult or impossible as nothing is documented at all. (What the hell is an NSNumber?  Why do all the controls return a useless object?)</p>
  
  <p>I don't really have any specific project in mind right now, but I would like to be able to write C++ that can draw pixels much in the same way. Maybe I'm crazy but I want that kind of control.</p>
  
  <p>Until I can overcome this, I'm limited to writing programs that run in the console by printing text and scrolling up as the screen gets full.</p>