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Driver: Win32 and WinNT
Author: Vadim Beloborodov, Anatoli Soltan, Salvador E. Tropea
Status: Complete
$Revision: 1.1 $
This file documents details specific to the Win32 and WinNT drivers. Both
drivers can be used for Win32 systems, this means the WinNT driver is also ok
for Windows 95. When we say "Win32" we refer to the 32 bits versions of
Windows. The first Win32 version of Windows released to the market was
Windows 95. You can divide Win32 platforms in two big groups: The Windows 95
and other Win32 versions that runs on top of DOS, they are Windows 95, 98 and
Me (Millenium). And the Windows NT and others that doesn't run on top of DOS,
they are Windows NT, 2000 and XP. These are the names upto year 2002, newer
releases are supposed to be all in the Windows NT family.
1. INTRODUCTION
2. FEATURES
3. IMPORTANT DETAILS
4. CONFIGURATION VARIABLES
1. INTRODUCTION
Currently you'll find two different drivers, they are quite similar and
will converge in the future. Currently the differences are really small
because I (SET) recoded both drivers and added a lot of important things. In
the process I made them more similar.
The differences are:
Win32: It uses a separated thread to read the input events, all the keyboard
and mouse events are stored in a queue. The screen update is simpler
but slower.
WinNT: Uses only one execution thread, events are polled and the queue is
maintained by the OS. The screen is updated using a buffer to assemble
the text and then it's sent in one call. It seems to be faster.
Which driver have more priority depends on the compiler you used to create
the application. If Borland compiler was used the WinNT driver will have more
priority and if MinGW/Cygwin was used Win32 will have more priority. This is
just because Vadim contributed the first Win32 code that compiled only with
MinGW and Anatoli contributed the first WinNT driver that compiled only with
Borland C++ compiler and only worked for Windows NT family. With the time
they became more and more similar.
You can change which driver is used using a configuration file.
These are a simple drivers that uses the Win32 console API. That's the set
of services offered by Win32 OS to use text mode. I must admit the API is
well documented and quite clean. Lamentably is not hard to hit bugs and
stupid limitations that you can do nothing to overcome.
2. FEATURES
The drivers supports:
* Window size. Note the size must fit in the screen, if the screen isn't big
enough you'll get the bigger posible size. Also note this depends on some
things you can't control: screen resolution, font size and window position.
Only the third could be controlled. Also note it ever fails if the
application is running in full screen and resized applications won't be able
to go fullscreen.
* Window title set/restore.
* Most keyboard combinations.
* Restore user screen. In some cases the text cursor seems to be lost after
running the application, this seems to be a bug in Win32 API triggered by
some missuse from my part. If you minimize the window and restore it, or just
hide it under another window and then make it visible again the cursor
appears. It doesn't happend in all situations and the code specifically
restores it.
3. IMPORTANT DETAILS
These drivers seems to be slower on Windows 9x family and faster on Windows
NT family when compared to the DOS driver running windowed. I think that's
because Windows NT doesn't draw all the information sent to the screen,
instead the content is refreshed periodically. It doesn't apply to the
Windows 9x version running fullscreen where the speed is really slow, this is
even worst for the Win32 driver. I would like to get feedback about it.
When you try to resize an application that's windowed using the mouse what
you do is change the size of the font. It only works when the font size is
set to "Auto". If the value is fixed you can just reduce the size of the
window and get scroll bars. At least that's how Windows 98 SE works.
At least on my system the window can go to full screen only when the size
is 80x25 or 80x50. Otherwise the color palette changes and the application
must remain windowed. I don't know why the palette changes and you can't
control the color palette.
4. CONFIGURATION VARIABLES
Only a few configuration variables are supported, none specific for these
drivers. The supported variables are: ScreenWidth, ScreenHeight, AppCP, ScrCP
and InpCP.
Note that ScreenWidth and ScreenHeight are limited as explained in
"Features" and the code page shouldn't be forced because:
1) The API supports a very limited set of code pages.
2) The fonts are fixed and encoded as the OS reports.
3) The API have mechanisms to inform the current code page. This code page is
hard to change for Windows 95 family.
For more information about configuration files read the corresponding doc.
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