Welcome to Graphic Vision ------------------------- Copyright (c) 1995,1996 Jason Burgon All rights reserved All rights not expressly licensed to the user are reserved to the developer. Version 1.20 (20:08:96) TABLE OF CONTENTS ----------------- 1. Overview 2. Minimum system requirements. 3 Warranty 4. Copyright Notice 5. Installation 6. Compiling the Graphic Vision run-time-library. 7. Compiling the demo programs. 8. How to get help 9. When the Demo program won't run 10. Contacting the author 11. Credits 1. OVERVIEW =========== Graphic Vision has been modeled on Borland International's pascal version of Turbo Vision 2.0 (TV) Application Framework. It has almost exactly the same functionality, user and programmer interface as Turbo Vision, but uses a graphics screen for its visual output instead of TV's text-only screen. Graphic Vision (GV) is not "Turbo Vision on a graphics screen". There would be little point in making Graphic Vision *look* like TV. GV just *works* like TV. GV's visual appearance is similar to that of Microsoft Windows 3.1, though it's appearance can easily be altered for specialist applications, such as games, by simply re-writing or overriding some of the draw methods. All existing Turbo Vision applications should convert to Graphic Vision, most of them quite easily. You can also use GV applications that you would never have considered using TV for, such as games "front ends". Like TV, Graphic Vision fully supports real and 16-bit DOS protected mode programs. Later versions will also support 32-bit DPMI if Borland ever get round to releasing a 32-bit DPMI Pascal compiler. Graphic Vision uses its own (very fast) graphics engine (including mouse cursor animation) which is VESA VBE compliant. This allows Graphic Vision applications to use any screen resolution from 320x200 to 1600x1200 with almost every SVGA graphics card ever made. The mouse is fully supported in all GV compatible video modes, which can be up to 32 x 32 pixels in size when the target CPU is a 386 or better (16 x 32 on a 286). 2. MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS ============================== DOS 3.0 286 processor 640K RAM (2MB for the DPMI version) SVGA Graphics card capable of 640 x 480 x 256 colours VESA BIOS or TSR conforming version 1.0 or higher (UniVESA driver supplied) Hard Drive with at least 2MB free Turbo Pascal for DOS (version 7.0) Recomended System Requirements DOS 6.2 Fast 386 processor or better Microsoft compatible mouse (Version 8.0 or better) SVGA video card with capable of 800 x 600 x 256 colours VESA BIOS or TSR conforming version 1.0 or higher Hard Drive with at least 10M free Borland Pascal (version 7.0) Graphic Vision only supports 256 colour VGA/SVGA video modes. I did think about supporting other modes, but this is looking unlikely at the moment. 3. WARRANTY =========== As you expected.... This software is provided "as is", with no warranty expressly stated or implied. The user of this software assumes all risk of use. Jason G Burgon will not be held liable for any loss of profit or damages due to claims based on consequential, incidental, or other similar damage claims. 4 COPYRIGHT =========== YOU MAY ONLY USE THIS SHAREWARE PRODUCT FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE OF EVALUATING ITS SUITABILITY FOR YOUR REQUIREMENTS. THE EVALUATION PERIOD LASTS FOR 30 (THIRTY) DAYS, AFTER WHICH TIME YOU MUST EITHER REGISTER OR LICENCE GRAPHIC VISION OR STOP USING IT AND ANY PROGRAMS CONTAINING ANY PART OF THIS PRODUCT. See LICENCE.DOC for the copyright and full warranty agreement. 5. INSTALLATION =============== This product comes with its own interactive installer/demo program which allows you to specify which parts of the product you want to install and the directories you want to put them into. Not only that, the installation program is itself a Graphic Vision application, so you can have a look at GV in action before deciding to install it! INSTALL.EXE will make a temporary directory (\GV$) on your hard drive then copy all the files needed to run the demo/installer into it. These files and the temporary directory it makes will be deleted when you exit the installer. Installing from the .ZIP archive Create a temporary directory (eg C:\TEMP\GV) and extract all from the .ZIP archive into it or exctract all the files onto an empty 1.44MB floppy disk, then follow the instructions for intalling from a floppy disk below. You can delete all the files in the temporary directory (C:\TEMP\GV) after you have finished the install process, but you may want to keep VESAINFO.EXE and UNIVESA.EXE. Installing from the floppy disk Run INSTALL.EXE that is on the distribution disk (eg A:INSTALL). This program will check your machine is GV compatible, then copy and run the GV demonstation/installation program on your hard drive. Choosing Options|Install will then display the install screen where you can choose the parts of this product you want to install and the directories you want to install them into. After installation. the Mahjong! game will be in a zip file in the GV\EXAMPLES\MJ sub-directory. This archive will need unzipping manually. See the WHEN THE DEMO WON'T RUN section if it won't. Because Graphic Vision contains some code that is copyright of Borland International Inc I cannot supply the Graphic Vision source code "as is". What I provide you with the registered version are all the DIFFERENCES between the Turbo Vision source code and its Graphic Vision equivalent. The GV installation program makes copies of your Borland run-time-library source files and "patches" my code into them. Hey presto, you have the Graphic Vision source code and I still have a shirt on my back. This does mean you need the Borland RTL disk (supplied with Borland Pascal with Objects 7.0) if you want the Graphic Vision source. You can still program in Graphic Vision using the supplied TPU's and TPP's if you do not have Borland's RTL disk or are evaluating GV with the shareware version. 6. COMPILING THE GRAPHIC VISION RTL ==================================== Most of the source code for GV's RTL is not in this evaluation version, but there are a some RTL files do need compiling before you can compile any of the demo programs, so this is the first thing to do. The following two sections assume you have installed this package into the default directories (as recommended by the installer program). 1 From the DOS prompt, change to the GV base directory (C:\BP\GV) 2 invoke BP.EXE by typing BP (BP.EXE must be in your DOS path). 3 The C:\BP\GV directory contains IDE startup files appropriate for re-compiling the Graphic Vision RTL files. 4 Use FILE:OPEN to open the BUILDGV.PAS file, and read what it says. 5 Set the Primaray file to BUILDGV.PAS 6 Select the appropriate platform (Real-mode or Protected-mode), then rebuild the RTL by selecting COMPILE|BUILD from the IDE menu bar. 7 All the GV run-time TPU's / TPP's have now been built and are residing in the C:\BP\GV\UNITS directory. Make sure this directory is in your IDE's UNITS path when compiling a Graphic Vision unit or application. 7. COMPILING THE DEMO PROGRAMS =============================== All GV directories containing source code contain a BP.TP and a TURBO.TP configuration file, so all you have to do is exit BP.EXE, "CD" to the appropriate GV sub-directory and type "BP" or "TP" to invoke the appropriate pascal IDE. Some of the examples use a help file, so the next thing to do is change to the GV\TOOLS directory and compile GVHC.PAS. The resulting executable (GVHC.EXE) should be put in your PATH; the obvious place to put it is in \BP\BIN. This is also true for the shared resources script compiler; RSCMAKE.EXE. Now you have all the tools required to make any of the example programs. You should try compiling GVDEMO first. This is in the GV\EXAMPLES\GVDEMO directory. Simply "CD" to that directory and invoke BP.EXE or TURBO.EXE as appropriate, then set the "Primary File" to GVDEMO.PAS and compile. GVDEMO uses a help file, so you will need to compile this with GVHC.EXE; use the batch file MH.BAT to do this for you. There are also two DOS batch files: MKRDEMO.BAT and MKPDEMO.BAT that will build the real-mode and DPMI versions of GVRDEMO respectfully. MKRDEMO.BAT uses TPC to build a real-mode version while MKPDEMO.BAT uses BPC to build a DPMI version. I'm sure you're capable of figuring out any problems you might have. Let me know if you do get stuck or if the installer doesn't work properly. I do not recommend using TPW when writing GV apps because it does not give you access to the Graphic Vision IDE on-line help. Please read the GV2TV.DOC (C:\BP\GV\DOCS) document. It gives helpful tips on converting your Turbo Vision programs. 8. HOW TO GET HELP ================== The GVISION.TPH file on the distribution disk is a Borland IDE compatible help file that documents all the differences between Turbo and Graphic Vision. You should add this to the help file list in your Turbo or Borland Pascal IDE (HELP|FILES). You should also have TVISION.TPH in this list. Any Graphic Vision method, procedure, variable, object, type or constant that is functionally the same as its Turbo Vision equivalent does not make an appearance in GVISION.TPH. Having both the TV and GV help files in the help files list allows you to determine if an identifier is the same as the TV equivalent, is new to GV or works differently to its TV equivalent: (1) If Ctrl-F1 takes you straight to a Turbo Vision help screen, the identifier has the same function in both GV and TV (eg TScroller). (2) If Ctrl-F1 takes you straight to a Graphic Vision help screen, the identifier is new to Graphic Vision (eg UnderLineXY). (3) If Ctrl-F1 takes you to the help index which is showing both a Turbo Vision and a Graphic Vision entry for the same topic then the identifier has a different function, or works differently in GV than it does in TV (eg ScreenMode). Note that some Graphic Vision drawing functions have the same name as those in the Graph unit. The Graphic Vision objects inheritance diagrams only provide hotlinks to the fields and methods that are new to GV, or work differently to their TV equivalent. This makes them easy to spot since they appear in a different colour to the other fields and methods that are functionally equivalent to the TV identifier of the same name. You can get the help screen for these by double-clicking on them. If you have any problems with this product, please read this file, the documentation files, the online help file, the Turbo Vision 2.0 help file and the Borland Pascal manuals first. See "Contacting the Author" if you still have a question and need assistance. 9 WHEN THE INSTALLER WON'T RUN ============================== INSTALL.EXE should run on any DOS machine ever built that has more memory than the original ZX80. You know it is running when you get the copyright message. If INSTALL.EXE is OK it will produce a meaniful error message if it is unable to run the demo/installation program. Use this information to correct the problem and then try running INSTALL again. Please note that the installation program proper is a Graphic Vision application, and as such it requires an SVGA video card and VESA Video Bios Extensions in order to run. If you have an SVGA video card, but no VESA BIOS you can use the UNIVESA TSR on the distribution disk to provide them. Copy it into a sensible directory such as C:\DOS\DRIVERS and then add the following line in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file: C:\DOS\DRIVERS\UNIVESA.EXE After you re-boot you can use VESAINFO.EXE (also on the distribution disk) to verify you now have VESA bios extensions. Type "VESAINFO 101" to verify that your graphics card can support 640x480x256. Just type "VESAINFO /?" for more information on this utility. Please note that I recommend using the VESA VBE (preferably version 1.2 or better) driver written for your specific video card in preference to the UniVesa driver if you can get it. Compuserve members might find a suitable driver in the VESA section of the PC Programming+ forum (GO VESA). UniVesa is a FreeWare program written by Kendall Bennett. I do not recommend the UniVbe51 driver from SciTech software as it is not, in my opinion, a very good product. Please contact me if you find problems with the installation program. 10. CONTACTING THE AUTHOR ========================= I'm always pleased to hear from people evaluating Graphic Vision. Please don't hesitate to email me to let me know what problems you're having and what you like and don't like about GV. Jason G Burgon Postal Address: 11 Thorsby Close Brant Road Lincoln. LN4 9DF England Email address: gv@jayman.demon.co.uk World Wide Web: http://jayman.demon.co.uk I would prefer emails or a 3.5" floppy (straight ASCII or .WRI format for documents please) to written documentation. Please do not use characters in your source files (Switch the "Use tab Characters" option off) because both BP and BPW are hopeless at printing a decent listing, and the way BP uses tab characters causes havoc with word processors. 11 Credits ========== My thanks go to: Bruce Ruona for: Being the best beta tester a person could ask for. Writing his wonderful GV based Mahjong! game. Writing the RSCMAKE.EXE resource compiler and letting me distribute it with Graphic Vision. See RESOURCE.DOC on how to use this utility. Michael Chavers for: Being such a GV enthusiast and keeping my spirits up! Putting GV up on his web site: http://www.en.com/users/grendel/ Anne Waltham for: Upteen million cups of coffee. :-) --- End of file