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
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