Graphic characters in Norton Utilities SYS-V
Richard Foulk
richard at pegasus.com
Fri Jul 27 20:40:59 AEST 1990
>In the current version of the Utilities, if a full-screen program sees that
>it's running on a mappable screen, it goes into a special high-performance
>mode that writes directly to the screen and has the line-drawing characters
>hard-coded in. For people not using code page 437, this can produce some
>rather peculiar looking screens. It's a limitation of the current product
>that we expect to fix in a future version.
>
>In the meantime, you might try the "-term" flag which tells it to run through
>terminfo and curses even though it's on the console, and give it a terminfo
>entry that better reflects your screen characters. It's not quite as fast as
>direct writes, but might look nicer.
>
What in the world did you gain by talking directly to the screen? A little
speed?! Or was the idea to make the package non-portable?
Unsophisticated developers have been tying text-display based (non-graphic)
utilities to specific hardware for years now, on pc's and mac's and
others. They often get burnt later. And the utility gains basically
nothing; perhaps enough additional speed to almost notice, or it looks
a little prettier, but the desired function isn't noticeably enhanced.
The bugs tend to be a little more interesting I guess. There's certainly
more opportunity for them to be created.
Maybe I missed something here, what in the world does a Norton Utilities
clone have to gain from direct video?
--
Richard Foulk richard at pegasus.com
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