David said:
There's also
an assortment of DOS extenders which maybe could help?
<http://www.thefreecountry.com/programming/dosextenders.shtml>
There is an XMS 3.01
specification. Windows XP does not deliver it, even though it was designed long
before XP. It supports more than 64meg of RAM (or is the limit on XMS blocks set
at 16meg?) with what it calls SXMS blocks. Curiously, DOS 6.22 delivers XMS
3.01, and so does OpenDOS. There is also a DPMI (DOS Protected Mode
Interface) 1.0 specificaion (32bit), and Windows only supports version 0.9,
which does not include everything you might want to do with
a thirty-two bit API.
That looks like planned obsolescence to
me.
There is a GDI+ environment that runs under
Windows, and I had or hav a package that requires it. I think the jee stands for
gnome: It is designed to port into X-Windows. Half of the trick of
programming for a Graphical Application Programmer's Interface (GAPI) is finding
the best documentation for it, whether tutorial or reference manual. If you are
lucky, someone figured out what best documentation means and donated it to
your local library. Beyond that, there is a Software Development Kit (SDK), and
a Device Development Kit (DDK). I think the SDK comes with a lot of commercial
compilers. I asked about the DDK for Windows 3.1 in 1993. It was over six
hundred dollars.
DDKs are the only place I know of where M$ bows
to open source.
IOW, they provide source code for exemplary
device drivers.
In the open
source world, there is DOSbox, so one might be able to figure out how to
patch some code from that into winfract for sound. Then again, if you will do
that much, then you might as well patch in the code for making DOS sessions into
an AVI, and the bit about recording OPL as a wav file, too.
Okay...so now I do not know what I want the
fractint team to work on, because DOSbox is basically a DOS extender, and there
might be a lot of programs that someone might want to record.
I am leaning towards linking to DOSbox on
the FracTint web page, and if anyone wants to deliver FRACTINT on disk,
DOSbox should be included. Oh, and cwsdpmi, too, because DOSbox does not do
DPMI. Heh...just ran MSD under DOSbox. It supports XMS driver version 3.01,
whereas cmd.exe only supports 2.77.
Functionality over performance.
_______
QUANDO OMNI FLUNKUS MORITATI (when all else
fails, play dead)