Re: Translating Euphoria Apps -- Which compiler do you use?
- Posted by CChris Aug 16, 2008
- 1340 views
... I don't think any, many a tiny amount, of DOS development is going on these days so my desire would have been that 4.0 removes DOS support. If you want to do DOS dev, you can keep a copy of 3.1 around. Anyway, that's another thread 
Jeremy
Out of curiosity, I did some Googling for DOS programs - didn't find many, and to be honest, the majority are really old, just out there for nostalgia or in case someone really needs a copy.
Very few new ones, and even those are pretty rough. I'm not saying they're poorly written, just that people now expect more from a computer than DOS can reasonably deliver. So they tend to be difficult to use. Not the sort of thing you could deliver to your boss or sell in computer stores.
And anyone who is writing little routines for his/her own use has probably migrated to Linux by now, anyway.
Just my 2 cents worth.
To be fair, there is one DOS app I'd like to use again. It is an old text editor packed full with functionality, and with a proprietary macro language.
It does work.
Problem is, it is limited to the 16 basic DOS colors. They are unbearable for my eyes more than 10-15 minutes. When I had a vintage DOS machine, I could use an utility to remap the VGA colors. It just worked great. But it accesses the VGA card ports directly, and Windows wouldn't let it do that. I disassembled it, it is not too large, so I kow how it works.
I tried a couple programs that were supposed to help running old .COM programs which the driver is. They helped because they suppressed crashes, and I can change colors in VGA Master. But the colors are no longer reflected in the editor - nor to any other program -, which is eventually of no help.
If anyone knows how to tweak DOS basic colors under Winows XP, that would be cool. Perhaps then I can reengineer the program, either in Eu or any more suitable language. I don't for how long the IBM copyright is valid, but the driver is at least 20 year old.
CChris
