Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 11:16:42 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii To: Charles Krug cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: Text mode windowing In-Reply-To: <3456339B.6FBE6F9B@pentek.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Precedence: bulk On Tue, 28 Oct 1997, Charles Krug wrote: > 1. Write the display routines using int21 and int10. This is very > familiar territory for me, but I wonder if there isn't a better way that > can be done from protected mode. There's a better way even from real mode: direct video memory access. Please read the description of `conio' functions in the library reference (from the DOS prompt type "info libc func conio" and read there). And believe me: you DON'T want to mess with int21 and int10, unless you absolutely *have* to. They are not only terribly slow, they are also harder to use from a protected-mode program; you will have to unlearn some of the things you know from real-mode world, if you use these. > 4. Link using an existing library that provides some of the same > functions. Unfortunatly, the only one's that I have access to are real > mode--and frankly not much easier than writing my own int10 routines. One obvious alternative is the curses library. Its public domain implementation, called PDCurses, is available as v2tk/pdcNN.zip from the same place you get DJGPP (NN is a version number). Curses are available on many Unix systems, so it is a portable solution. For other alternatives, search the DJGPP mail traffic archives at http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/mail-archives/ for words like GUI, text-mode and such. There are quite a few text-mode GUI libraries that support DJGPP, and announcements are posted regularly to this group.