Re: Virtual HP-IL 40 col. video interface simulation
Message #5 Posted by Christoph Giesselink on 15 Aug 2012, 5:06 p.m.,
in response to message #2 by Geir Isene
Any development for other OS then Windows I must deny.
Most time of the HP82163A development I didn't spent on the video command set implementation, most time I spend on the GUI, especially on the terminal window. First time I realized that implementing the insert cursor would be tricky, but the implementation of the inverse characters set in combination with normal characters would be hairy. By default a text window under Windows has exact two colors, the text color and the background color. So my first realization was one window per character so I was able to choose the colors for each window/character separately. The window redraw was very slow!
Then I made a 2nd attempt in the WM_PAINT message handler, with no success. My 3rd attempt worked only with VS2005 and was flickering badly as cursor blinking. But this was the right way and I solved these problems. But overall I spend much more time only on this topic than on everything else on this project.
Of course it's possible to make it, editors with syntax highlight prove this, but companies spend a lot of money to get this knowledge. Perhaps you're using a toolkit like GTK+ or Qt, but sorry IMHO they don't look like a windows program and need additional hundreds? of Megabytes for development and runtime. And 2nd they don't solve the entire problem also, you still have to find out how this could be done.
And there's another important point, my motivation. I personally make these programs for myself and they must run on the systems I have. I have no interests to sell them, but I'm glad that other may find them useful. This is in tradition of the freeware and open source community.
Regards
Christoph
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