Abstract: An apparatus and a method for generating hardware icons and cursors to be used as graphical computer command and control. More particularly, hardware cursors can be used to select and manipulate hardware icons. In order to enable hardware cursors to select and manipulate hardware icons, the invention teaches the use of a display priority order in which hardware cursor has the highest priority followed by hardware icons and graphics display. The current invention also teaches synchronizing the horizontal pixel count and synchronizing the vertical line count for generating both hardware icons and cursors. Such synchronization allows a determination of whether a hardware cursor overlaps with a hardware icon to be made. This determination triggers an interrupt signal to alert the CPU about such overlap.