[fpc-pascal] Textmode IDE splitscreen?

[Nikolay Nikolov]

On 07/25/2016 12:57 AM, James Richters wrote:
> Is there a way to get the textmode IDE to do splitscreen the way Turbo
> Pascal used to if you had both a color and monochrome monitor?  It was very
> handy to trace through the source code on the monochrome monitor and watch
> it execute on the other one.. It prevented all the screen flashing when it
> had to output something to the screen as you traced through the program.
> I've been doing this on windows with TurboPascal with a customized version
> of DOSBOX that would show the monochrome monitor in a separate window from
> the color monitor.  Any suggestions for getting two windows with Free Pascal
> textmode IDE?
If you are using Windows, you can compile the IDE in FPC trunk with 
gdb/mi support, which works by opening your program in a new console 
window, so it gets the effect you want already under Windows. Lazarus 
also does the same thing, if you don't mind using a newer IDE.

For go32v2, it is possible to add dual (color and monochrome) display 
support and in fact I have such a machine working right now (featuring a 
CGA and an EGA in monochrome mode), but it only has an 8088 CPU, so 
go32v2 (which requires a 386+) won't run on it. But thanks to that I 
have already added detection of two video cards in the graph and crt 
units for i8086-msdos and I have ported the code to go32v2 as well. But 
these units provide support for only writing/drawing to a single 
display, so my dual display code involve only detection of all the 
available video modes from both monitors and video cards, but when you 
set an actual video mode, you still only write to a single screen. 
That's how the interface of these units was designed. The same thing 
applies to the video unit, which the IDE uses. But, as Pierre said, the 
IDE uses special code for switching to/from the user screen, so that 
support can be implemented in the IDE code. And the IDE can only be 
compiled on go32v2, because it includes the compiler and that doesn't 
fit in the memory constraints of i8086-msdos (640kb isn't enough for 
everybody :) ).

I've thought about trying to setup a dual-monitor configuration on a 
386+ and adding dual-monitor go32v2 IDE support, but the only 386+ I 
have, that has two ISA slots, is a K6-2 and I doubt if it's possible to 
configure it to run with two 8-bit ISA video cards, provided that this 
is a PCI/AGP era machine. I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect the BIOS 
would scream bloody murder if it doesn't find a VGA card on either one 
of the PCI slots or on the AGP slot. Has anybody tried something like 
this yet? :) I know it sounds fun to try, but it'd be a lot of hassle 
swapping all of these cards (both the ISA slots are occupied by sound 
cards right now, and there's an AGP video card as well, which has to be 
removed, otherwise it would conflict with the CGA and the EGA).

Nikolay