---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 11:28:02 -0500 From: Day Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: LifeRaft <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: LifeRaft <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [SurvPC] what does it mean: Re: C++ hardware compatibility problems?? ANDY wrote: > so if I write a program either in C/C++, assembly language or machine > language, I must have a *thorough* knowledge of the inner workings of > the OS, DOS, Windows, *nix that I am writing the program to run on, > *before* I start writing the the code (not necessarily the program) I have an assembly code assembler which says it can compile for either dos or nix. I havnt tried nix yet. may havta soon. What do I do with assembly language? as little as possible. but sometimes inevitable. I like working with the text mode screen. It is not a 'resizable window', and therefore, I know that what I present to the user is 100% of the screen area. I have more control. I only have one font in the text mode screen, but it aint hard to design it anyway I want. Years ago, for BBS ANSI graphics, I produced one which replaced all of the foreign letters and other junk with geometric shapes, line and curve segments. Clunky ANSI graphics could be a lot smoother. Try to do that in C or C+,++. and at some point, the software will tell you to make a call to the bitmaps. Well, the bitmap for a 50X80 screen is, IIRC 2048 bytes, and you aint gonna create them in any C. And if you make the int 10 call, you can have them installed by adding another 30 bytes to to bitmap set. Ergo... you dont need the C language at all. What you do need, is something like Ralf Brown's database of x86 and ROM BIOS chip interrupts. This is what the computer knows when comes off the assembly floor, without any OS installed. Surf for Ralf Brown's INTERVUE database of interrupts. Simtel usta, but maybe Garbo or somebody will have it. IIRC about 1.5meg of compressed .zip which opens up to about 4 meg. IF you have that database, you can do anything you want with a PC. The reason I do so little assy, is that a: it's a bitch. b: there aint hardly anything that I want to do that aint already been done. I got my minor in comp sci in 1971. over the course of the last 30 years, I might have produced 5000 bytes of assembly code. Not kilobytes, not megabytes. just plain bytes. Virus code is less than 100 bytes. Were I in school today, I'd still take assembly. it makes you understand, far more clearly just what the fuck the computer is doing. And some times, on some few rare occassions, it will let you do something no other computer language will let you do. At this juncture, the only other language I'd take is JAVA. Yeah, I know about Microsoft. their stab at it is just the thrashing tail of a dead dragon. JAVA has already gotten under their armor.
