Is there a way to access hardware directly in Python?

Question

I want to learn about graphical libraries by myself and toy with them a bit. I built a small program that defines lines and shapes as lists of pixels, but I cannot find a way to access the screen directly so that I can display the points on the screen without any intermediate.

What I mean is that I do not want to use any prebuilt graphical library such as gnome, cocoa, etc. I usually use Python to code and my program uses Python, but I can also code and integrate C modules with it.

I am aware that accessing the screen hardware directly takes away the multiplatform side of Python, but I disregard it for the sake of learning. So: is there any way to access the hardware directly in Python, and if so, what is it?

Answer 1

No, Python isn't the best choice for this type of raw hardware access to the video card. I would recommend writing C in DOS. Well, actually, I don't recommend it. It's a horrible thing to do. But, it's how I learned to do it, and it's probably about as friendly as you are going to get for accessing hardware directly without any intermediate.

I say DOS rather than Linux or NT because neither of those will give you direct access to the video hardware without writing a driver. That means having to learn the whole driver API, and you need to invoke a lot of "magic," that won't be very obvious because writing a video driver in Windows NT is fairly complicated.

I say C rather than Python because it gives you real pointers, and the ability to do stupid things with them. Under DOS, you can write to arbitrary physical memory addresses in C, which seems to be what you want. Trying to get Python working at all under an OS terrible enough to allow you direct hardware access would be a frustration in itself, even if you only wanted to do simple stuff that Python is good at.

And, as others have said, don't expect to use anything that you learn with this project in the real world. It may be interesting, but if you tried to write a real application in this way, you'd promptly be shot by whoever would have to maintain your code.

Answer 2

This seems a great self-learning path and I would add my two-cents worth and suggest you consider looking at the GObject, Cairo and Pygame modules some time.

The Python GObject module may be at a higher level than your current interest, but it enables pixel level drawing with Cairo (see the home page) as well as providing a general base for portable GUI apps using Python

Pygame also has pixel level methods as well as access methods to the graphics drivers (at the higher level) - here is a quick code example