VIDEO DISPLAY CONTROL

An apparatus for displaying video information includes a video display screen, a screen buffer, a frame buffer, and a video image data assembly module. The module assembles data from linked lists of screen objects, segment objects and field objects which identify images stored in the frame buffer into video image data to store in the screen buffer to be displayed on said screen. Data elements in the lists are linked in a hierarchical arrangement of most-significant to least-significant data elements, with significance denoted by the usual size of the data element as displayed on said screen, so that selecting data from an upper one of the members of a hierarchical list thereby selects data from a lower member by virtue of the linking of the lower member to the upper member. A television signal source supplies television signals to the video image data assembly module as data for one of the linked lists, A communication link to the video image data assembly module receives data to be listed in a linked list for display and data indicative of which of the linked lists is to be selected for assembly into the video image.