Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!kth!draken!tut!ra!chyde!ts
From: ts@chyde.uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi LASK)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Turbo Pascal 5.x
Keywords: Pascal, EGA/VGA
Message-ID: <556@chyde.uwasa.fi>
Date: 3 Jun 89 08:21:23 GMT
References: <22642@prls.UUCP>
Reply-To: ts@chyde.uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi LASK)
Organization: U of Vaasa, Finland
Lines: 21

In article <22642@prls.UUCP> wolsheim@prls.UUCP (Evert Wolsheimer) writes:
>Question : can anyone tell me if Turbo Pascal 5.x has EGA/VGA drivers ? 

Yes, it does.  If fact Turbo Pascal uses the same driver both for
EGA and VGA.  This means that you cannot get more colors on VGA than
you can on EGA (16) when using Turbo Pascal.  Incidentally, these
drivers are called bgi drivers, and they can be included in the
Turbo Pascal executable, which makes such programs nicely portable. 
The disadvantage of the bgi drivers is that programming them
correctly is far from easy.  In fact, building and including the
drivers in a Turbo Pascal program for the first time is a quite a
daunting task, and the documentation how to do it is scattered badly
in Turbo Pascal manuals and additional files.  Although the system
works very well once you manage the tricks, I think that in
documenting this feature the otherwise excellent Borland has clearly
failed. 

...................................................................
Prof. Timo Salmi
School of Business Studies, University of Vaasa, SF-65101, Finland
Internet: ts@chyde.uwasa.fi Funet: vakk::salmi Bitnet: salmi@finfun