Trying to write individual pixels to the screen

Hello,
I am trying to write individual pixels onto the screen, preferrably in a window, but that isnt necessary. I need no other drawing tools, just pixels.

I need to be able to do this very fast as I want to display the ouput from things like fluid dynamics systems in real time and other things which will gobble up processing power.

I know I can write to the video memory, but I do not understand how.

I am pretty new to C++ but have coded before, so I understand the basics at least.

Can anyone point me in the direction of some good resources?

I have looked at opengl, but cannot get writing pixels to work, I can do points, but these are incredibly slow.

I am coding in dev-cpp, would anyone recommend any other good packages (free ones)?

Thanks
Ian

There's probably some simple graphics libraries out there that you could use, but right now all I can think of is Allegro (a google search could probably find that pretty easily).

Also you could try DirectX, but it may be a bit complicated for a new C++ programmer. The SDK is at msdn. I think you can get it to work with Dev-C++ (I was able to use the DirectX 8.0 sdk at least)

You should probably search the game programming board also

Edit:

You could also look at SDL. If I remember correctly it isn't too complex, although I never used it much

Find the address of the video buffer and have fun!

I installed SDL, and had many problems.

After reading the how-to's it worked perfectly!

Runs nice'n'fast, and I can really easily write pixels to he screen once now I have found the function for it.


Thanks,
Ian