[fpc-pascal]Mouse Unit

[Sebastian Günther]

Aitor Santamaría Merino schrieb:

> Not quite right.
> The quite old antivirus "Artemis Professional", ancestor of nowaday's 
> Panda Antivirus, had a nice feature: it is textmode, but it used 
> MS-MOUSE pixel granularity at text mode to display a "kind-of" graphic 
> mode mouse: I guess it read the mouse pointer (at pixel granularity), 
> and modified four characters in the Character Generator of the graphic 
> card to create a mouse pointer that moved with pixel granularity.
> True that effectively, clicks must be then catched by dividing by the 
> character size and to adapt to the correct granularity. But the previous 
> behaviour wouldn't be possible.
> 
> I think the that using MS-MOUSE interface (I think MSMOUSE unit), you 
> can have this pixel granularity in text mode, but breaks portability.

there are other old DOS programs which have this pseudo-graphic mouse 
cursor as well (I think Norton Utilities for example). German magazine 
c't had an article on this topic about 10 years ago, and they even 
provided source code which shows how this can be done (basically you are 
right, 4 characters are permanently modified). To Mark: This is a quite 
complex task, and is totally out of scope for a general-purpose and 
portable mouse unit. You would have to write your own unit specifically 
for DOS, and it wouldn't be possible to port it to Win32 or Unix.


- Sebastian