From: Alex Roberts <robo AT earthling DOT net>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: Mouse Cursors, GUI's.
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 1997 15:03:59 +0100
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Peter Palotas wrote:
> 
> I've been wondering... Is there any good GUI's out there? I mean good
> looking, and good working, portable GUI's`? (For DJGPP ofcourse, well,
> portable means that it should compile on several platforms, but since I'm
> olny interested in it compiling using GCC, and since *I* am using GCC on
> DOS, i.e. DJGPP that's what I'm interested in.)
> 
> Well, anyway, I*ve seen a lot of bad GUI's anyway, but not very many good
> ones. I've also written some bad ones myself, but I think that maybe I
> should write a good one. Then I have some problems though...
> 
> First problem is the mouse-pointer. How do you greate an absolutely
> flicker-free mouse-pointer? I mean, just look at windows. It doesn't
> flicker. How did they do their mouse-pointer really? I mean, in DOS most
> GUI's and mouse-apps, (with source-code released anyways) hide the
> mouse-cursor whenever a draw is about to occur. This is all nice, and works
> in most cases, but it doesn't look good. And how a GUI looks, *is* really
> important I think.
> 
> Next problem, which isn't really a *big* problem, would be the event
> handler. How do you write a good event-handler? Using interrupts such as
> the keyboard-interrupt and mouseinterrupt to trap events doesn't work very
> nice since you can't do I/O from a hooked interrupt. So that's out of the
> question. What you could have is a procedure looping, checking for events,
> this works, but then you can't do anything else in your program meanwhile,
> hence it leads to quite a lot of idle time. You could use a
> multi-threading-library I suppose, but I don't know how stable these are,
> and so on. Wouldn't it be good if DJGPP implemented a version of fork()
> (Which I've understood is a multithreading-function under unix)?
> 
> Then all of the above almost only applies to DOS, not unix... Well, I don't
> know much about unix, so I guess someone would have to help me convert some
> stuff anyway. BUt what you do need is a keyboard-handler, and a
> mouse-handler that is portable... Are there two such things out there?
> 

Check out Allegro at http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro
It;s really kewl, if you want a 3D looking GUI, after getting Allegro,
d/l DEGUI (you can find it at the Allegro page).

Hope this helps, l8r
-- 
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