I've been using PB/dos forever, doing lots of engineering graphics
stuff, which generally works OK under Windows. But to get with the new
millenium, I did my first true Windows graphic thing, using PBCC v4.
It's a simulation of a vector heads-up character generator system for
a military aircraft, and it works fine. But I had a few strangenesses
and I'd appreciate comments from anybody who might have them...
There seem to be a bunch of predefined constants like %GREEN, for
24-bit (graphics mode) colors. Are they documented anywhere? I can't
find them in the manual. And apparently the 16 text-mode colors don't
have corresponding defs. (And why just 16 text colors?)
Is there a general list of defined constants?
My program runs in a small text console which accepts user commands,
and it opens a separate graphics window to display my displays.
I want to "animate" the plot path, so I plot directly to the graphics
pane. It's impressively slow, about 100 points/second. But if I reduce
the graphics window and re-enlarge, it's done!
If I close the graphics window (clicking the mouse on its 'x' box) it
seems to corrupt the program. If the program closes the graphics
window, it's OK. Maybe continuing to do pixel sets through an invalid
graphics handle punches holes in the main code? Is there a way to tell
if the graphics window has been closed?
In the plot loop, I do an occasional INKEY$ check to see if the user
wants to abort plotting. I enabled mouse clicks too, so a click in the
console pane is supposed to stop plotting, too. But it usually takes 2
or 3 clicks to get its attention. Any idea why?
On some PCs, the small control console comes up really ugly
full-screen, and I have reduce it and then futz with properties to get
it to be and stay a console pane. On some PCs, it just works. Any idea
why?
Overall, pretty good. Learning curve and all, it didn't take many
hours to get the simulator running, the graphics look cool, and it
compiles to a clean little 41K .exe file.
Oh, I did a TCP/IP thing in PBCC, binary data and all, and it worked
great.
John
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