[fpc-pascal]Direct writes to console buffer

[James Mills]

On Sun, Aug 03, 2003 at 02:52:57AM -0400, L D Blake wrote:
> In reply to your message of August 3, 2003
> 
> > I'm trying to port some old Turbo Pascal programs to Windows 32-bit
> > console utilities.  They write directly to the screen buffer, which in
> > the DOS world an array of Word starting at ptr(SegB800,0) (for a color
> > display) or ptr(SegB000,0) for a monochrome one.  Now, as Windows
> > console utilities, I don't suppose it's so easy to get a pointer to
> > the upper left corner of the console window, or is it?
> 
> There's an additional complication... ME, NT, 2000 and XP won't let you write
> directly to the screen memory.  You'll probably need to re-work the screen
> access to use the through-the-drivers approach unless you are only interested
> in having your stuff work on 95 and 98.

In addition, I suggest using SDL which will work for windows. SDL is
probably a much better approach than trying to directly access video
RAM. And to makes things easier for you, once you learn to use SDL, you
could write a wrapper module so you don't have to even rewrite your old
programs :)

cheers
James

> 
> -----
>  L D Blake
> 
> 
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