Lost Cursor in PB-DOS

[Daniel Raymer]

I've used DOS PowerBasic almost every day since it was TurboBasic, and have never seen this before yesterday: Occasionally the blinking underscore cursor just disappears.

PB is still working, if I arrow up enough to hit the top of the visible page it starts scrolling the page just as if the cursor were there, and if I move the invisible cursor to the left far enough it jumps to the end of the previous line and the line number goes up by one.

But, no cursor! I have to exit PB and restart.
I haven't noticed any particular thing I was doing when it went AWOL.

Ideas?

[Chris Holbrook]

Overwriting a reserved memory location &H4060 which holds the cursor end position? More likely than a spurios BIOS call to reset the cursor (Int 1&H10, function 1.

[Daniel Raymer]

So, what do I do about it?

...anything I can look for to do, or stop doing?

[Arthur Gomide]

Try forcing the 'cursor on' using the LOCATE function accordingly, and check the PB following internal variables: pbvCursor1 (first cursor scan line), pbvCursor2 (last cursor scan line) and pbvCursorVis (True/False: cursor visibility).

[Daniel Raymer]

Found a Workaround but not the Cause

When the cursor disappears, do Debug...Reset_Display.

Why it happens, beats me!

[Arthur Gomide]

If you are using plain DOS, try a code page refresh with

MODE CON CP REF

[Knuth Konrad]

Try forcing the 'cursor on' using the LOCATE function accordingly, and check the PB following internal variables: pbvCursor1 (first cursor scan line), pbvCursor2 (last cursor scan line) and pbvCursorVis (True/False: cursor visibility).

That won't help, it sounds like he's experiencing this problem within the IDE.

[Rodney Hicks]

I've had a similar problem with PBWin 8.04 where the cursor(caret) is invisible. This only occurs when I've had PBWin minimized. I select some text with the cursor(mouse pointer) and cut it out and paste it back and I have the cursor(caret) back. I'm running Vista Home Premium on an HP Pavilion. I've always been of the opinion that it was the operating system at fault. Only happens once in a while, and may be related to a program I ran while PB was minimized.

Rod