Dos Extenders...

[Russ Jones]

Hi guys (and gals?)!

I see that PBDOS is now only $99, and since I already own PBDLL
6, I figured this would be a good addition. The only thing(s) that
hold me back are the following questions:

Can PBDLL run in a dos extension environment (such as dos4gw), or
will PBDOS only run in real mode?

What tools are available for manipulating graphics, such as
fastgraph (fastgraph for dos, I believe, requires a dos compiler
that runs in a non-real mode environment).

Without such a graphics tool, what are some of the tools available
to allow gfx manipulation without resorting to direct VGA control?
(Not that that's a bad thing, just more programming involved).

Thanks in advance!

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Talk Sense to a Fool and he Calls you Foolish...

[Russ Jones]

Originally posted by Russ Jones:
Hi guys (and gals?)!

Can PBDLL run in a dos extension environment (such as dos4gw), or
will PBDOS only run in real mode?

Oops, I meant "Can PBDOS run..."



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Talk Sense to a Fool and he Calls you Foolish...

[Andrew Collins]

Originally posted by Russ Jones:
Hi guys (and gals?)!

I see that PBDOS is now only $99, and since I already own PBDLL
6, I figured this would be a good addition. The only thing(s) that
hold me back are the following questions:

Can PBDLL run in a dos extension environment (such as dos4gw), or
will PBDOS only run in real mode?

What tools are available for manipulating graphics, such as
fastgraph (fastgraph for dos, I believe, requires a dos compiler
that runs in a non-real mode environment).

Without such a graphics tool, what are some of the tools available
to allow gfx manipulation without resorting to direct VGA control?
(Not that that's a bad thing, just more programming involved).

Thanks in advance!

PBDOS doesn't support DPMI.
It MIGHT run if you start dos4gw but you'll get no benefit from
it.
As for graphics there is the Zephyr SVGA library which I believe
is $39 or so.


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[Neil Hosgood]

Russ,
In my travels in the PBDOS world I am sure I have seen a
DPMI lib for PB. and I am sure if I didnt find it in the
downloads here then it was wasnt far away (on the net).


N.

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[Tom Hanlin]

Check out DPMIPB.zip at http://www.powerbasic.com/files/pub/pbdos/misc/

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Tom Hanlin
PowerBASIC Staff

[Russ Jones]

Thanks, guys!

I'm currently working on a platform game written in PBDLL and Fastgraph,
but after that (early next year, maybe - I'm getting married this October)
I may try some DOS programming even though it's almost a lost cause (?).

Thanks again!

Russell Jones

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Pontiac Aztek: Quite possibly the most hideous vehicle in the world today.

[Davide Vecchi]

I may try some DOS programming even though it's almost a lost cause (?)

IMO, no it isn’ t. It depends on the fields you target.
It’ s not even a cause in some senses (maybe DOS death is); use or don’ t use DOS depending on the technical features and commercial targets your app has to have. It’ s all but impossible that DOS will result the best choice for a given app.

DOS is actually choosen in several fields, whose users are often vertical and their own productivity has little to do with advertisements, trends etc. It’ s not that they are more intelligent, it’ s because of the difference, for example, between productivity in industrial automation or number crunching and productivity in office automation or publishing.

The programmers who use both DOS and Windows compilers depending on the case, simply won’ t abandon DOS to restrict theirselves to Windows, until Windows will come to have the same advantages DOS is actually choosen for, or until these advantages will become useless.

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[Russ Jones]

True, I wish Windows had some of DOS's nicer features (speed,
mainly, due to having ABSOLUTE control of the machine), but
conversely, I wish DOS had some of Windows nicer features (flat
memory model mainly. Does anyone know why Microsoft never upgraded
DOS to 32 bit, even before Windows was in development?).

For the kinds of things I want to develop (games and programming
language tools), Windows is probably the way to go to be the most
useful and accepted.

I only wish that Windows had a function that could turn off
multitasking for a particular program, like the Amiga's Forbid()
function...then event driven programming would not be required for
games AND they would be considerably faster. Oh well... (sigh)

Take care!

Russell Jones

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Pontiac Aztek: Quite possibly the most hideous vehicle in the world today.