Member Avatar for Nawar

Hello everyone:
OK, so I'm working with a hard head company and hard head boss who want until now to work with DOS, I want to make my programs with a good GUI environment, I tried to work with MGUI it's good but it has its quirks.
Then I tried opengui but until now i have some problems building the library
can anyone recommend me another library or how can i build opengui 3.0 with Borlandc 5.0

I want something like magic partition environment
(and I know there are other OS but....)

Thanks for your Help

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by TrustyTony
Member Avatar for sergent

Quit your job. Your boss is crazy

Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

There is no such thing as a good gui for MS-DOS Version 6.X or earlier. That's one reason Microsoft evolved into 32-bit protected mode programming and wrote MS-Windows operating system. MS-DOS simply doesn't support enough memory to allow for a GUI environment. About the best you can do is flip the screen into graphics mode and draw a few pretty pictures -- and very very slowly.

Member Avatar for TrustyTony

Windows 3.11 was considered somehow decent if you have huge memory (8 or even 16 MB ;) ).

Edited by TrustyTony because: n/a
Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

Yes it was -- but it ran in protected mode so that it could use all that ram.

Member Avatar for Schol-R-LEA

Do you happen to know why they want things in DOS?

Member Avatar for Frederick2

Like tonyjv intimated, I don't think its terribly useful to invest time in DOS coding at this point.

Having said that however, its possible to create quite a lot of GUI like 'controls' in DOS using the extended asci characters. A lot of us old time DOS coders did that before Win32 took over. For example, when I was learning assembler and C many years ago I made my own 'Open File' dialog box with recursive directory searches, scroll bars and such - all mousable. Using the Int 33h mouse interrupts you can create mousable programs. The old DOS style menues where you have a number for a selection, i.e.,

1) Open File
2) Calculate Volumes
3) Print Report
.
etc

can be made mousable by highlighting each selection as the mouse is moved over it. So on and soi forth.

For myself, I can't really see ever going back to something like that.

Here's just another thought though. I don't want to cause any language flamewars here, but I happen to divide my coding pretty evenly between the C/C++ and PowerBASIC languages. PowerBASIC has a product called the 'Console Compiler' that takes old DOS BASIC code and compiles it into 32 bit Win executables. I'm mentioning this because it wouldn't surprise me to learn that some of your boss's old programs were in some version of BASIC such as QuickBasic, TurboBasic PDS 7.1 or something like that. The executables produced by this language are as fast as C or C++ code. It may be a way to 'break into' the modern world for him!

Member Avatar for Nawar

the reason we are using DOS is For real time and interrupt issues, you know dos is very simple and one program will run at time, and there is no other program will interrupt the running program (like services,....)

and of course the obvious reason is my boss is from old school and his brain stopped at DOS OS

Edited by Nawar because: n/a
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