ASCII/ANSI GUI book

[Jonathan Busby]

(12-02-2019 05:46 PM)Wes Loewer Wrote:  

(12-01-2019 09:13 PM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  I assume he means graphical in the sense that you can use the mouse to draw and resize windows and blocks, drag on the scroll bars, point and click on menus, etc..

Speaking of using a mouse in text mode, does anyone remember those text based DOS programs that had a continuous moving "graphic" mouse pointer rather then the normal block that jumped around in more of a discrete manner? It wasn't really a graphics mouse of course, but it looked and acted like one. I'm not positive, but I think PC Tools for DOS might have had such a mouse pointer. There's a mention of this type of mouse pointer at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_mode#...characters along with a screen shot of Norton Utilities showing such a mouse pointer (not very good looking pointer in my opinion).

There was a mouse driver called "Precise Point" that put a really nice looking "graphics" mouse in text programs (look for pp111.zip). It worked by redefining 9 upper ascii characters that could be changed on the fly to give the appearance of an arrow. Later versions of DR-DOS also came with such a mouse driver, but not as nice looking as Precise Point.

It was pretty slick back in the day. ;-)

Well, when I was in my early teens, I used similar DOS based programs which could display a 256 color mouse pointer in text mode on a VGA display. The way this was accomplished was by allocating certain ANSI characters as reserved, and then altering, in real-time, the color and pixel bitmaps of those characters so as to display an actual, pixel-accurate, graphical mouse pointer When I was about 14 or 15 years old I remember programming similar tricks in Borland Turbo Pascal with inline 286 and 386 assembly

Regards,

Jonathan