Quote:Original post by pulpfist
In the old days there was a dos library where you could define boxes or areas on the console window and add text and colors to them. I remember trying it once a long time ago using Borlands compiler tools.

Is this what you are thinking about?
If it is, I don't think that library is available anymore. At least not unless you have a old Borland compiler installed.

If all you want to do is to change the background color you can take a look at these functions

There is a function among the console functions called SetConsoleScreenBufferInfoEx that I suspect could be used to define *boxes* but it is only available on Windows Vista.

There is a library called PDCurses that can do a lot of stuff. I managed to compile it using Visual C++ and the demos that follow the code works. However, as soon as I try to write a little test myself nothing happens, so I can't really recommend it yet lol.
Besides, compiling and installing it is not all that easy.

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In Visual C++ I been teaching my self Consol applications just to learn the code. I thought maybe that I could create my own back grounds using some of the ideas I got from other dos related programs.

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How ever I don't know what they were using or how they did it. Programing in pascal back then was hard. And today I can create a option like "DrawBox(x1,y1,x2,y2,bg,fg)" in pascal. Al it does is draws a box using ascii codes that draw lines a round the borders.

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All I'm trying to do is customize my program so that the menus look better with back ground graphics. If that what you want to call them..

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At this time I'm just trying to under stand what a library does.

Quote:Original post by bigjoe11a
I was wondering and I have seen some options that add back grounds to my consol projects.

An option to drawbg(); = (Draw Back Ground) or some thing like that. and maybe some options to create boxes. and even with a shadow. I'm new at this so please bear with me.

Joe

Quote:Original post by pulpfist

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In Visual C++ I been teaching my self Consol applications just to learn the code. I thought maybe that I could create my own back grounds using some of the ideas I got from other dos related programs.

The Windows XP console is very different from the DOS console even if it looks the same.
To make a long story short, console applictions under windows can not access OS and hardware memory directly the way dos applications could.
Therefore a lot of the functions from dos does not work anymore.

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How ever I don't know what they were using or how they did it. Programing in pascal back then was hard. And today I can create a option like "DrawBox(x1,y1,x2,y2,bg,fg)" in pascal. Al it does is draws a box using ascii codes that draw lines a round the borders.

They were probably using the dos functions that does not work anymore.
An exception is Borlands old compiler tools, like turbo pascal and turbo c++.
In Visual C++ that stuff won't work.

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All I'm trying to do is customize my program so that the menus look better with back ground graphics. If that what you want to call them..

I assume that you mean boxes with shadow effects and colors here. Real graphics like bitmaps can not be drawn in a console no matter what.
The best way to do that these days is to use PDCurses. I can give you info on how to make PDCurses work in Visual C++ if you want.

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At this time I'm just trying to under stand what a library does.

A library is basically pre-compiled source code that you can link with your program. A library contains normal source code like classes and functions.
Once you have linked such a library to your program, you can use the classes and functions from the library in your own code.
You are using libraries all the time, maybe without knowing it. For example when you say #include <windows.h> in your program, you are linking to a library.
You can also write and compile your own libraries with Visual C++.

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Sorry I couldn't get back to you sooner. Any way Yes. Any information you can get for me about PDCurses. Please Let me Know

#include <curses.h>#pragma comment(lib, "pdcurses.lib")int main(void) {	WINDOW *mainWindow = initscr();	noecho();	cbreak();	nodelay(mainWindow, TRUE);   	wrefresh(mainWindow);   	WINDOW *helloWindow = newwin(12, 25, 5, 5);	box(helloWindow, ACS_VLINE, ACS_HLINE);   	curs_set(0);	while(1) 	{		int ch = getch();		if(ch == 27) 	  			break;            				mvwprintw(helloWindow, 5, 6, "Hello world!");   		wrefresh(helloWindow);   	}	endwin();   	return 0;}