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Turbo Pascal IDE question.
Curt Carpenter:
Just for fun, I installed TurboPascal in a DOSbox on my RPi this morning. Does anybody remember if you could use a mouse with the IDE, and if so if it required any special configurations?
440bx:
I remember it was possible to use a mouse with the TP IDE but, that ability was provided by a driver that was bundled with the mouse hardware.
IOW, I don't think that _natively_ the TP IDE supported a mouse but, mouse manufacturers wrote drivers to make the mouse emulate keyboard input.
As you can imagine it has been quite some time since I've used TP on MS-DOS, therefore I could have some of the "details" wrong and, FWIW, I never thought using a mouse in MS-DOS was useful in any way (it just slowed me down), as a result, I rarely had the mouse installed (I vividly remember the mouse driver noticeably slowing things down which was a dealbreaker from the start.)
Basically, the above means that, if you want mouse support in the DOS box, it has to be provided by a driver and, in this case, one that should most likely be provided by the dos box virtualizer.
HTH.
marcov:
Afaik most TV like programs had a textcursor mouse and it allowed to click e.g. file menus, and focus windows (if tiled).
There were also shortcuts (F<x> keys) to cycle to the windows, a bit alt-tab like.
Most importantly, some IDEs (like Topspeed's slightly newer IDE) had multi monitor support, they could run the debugger windows on the second (usually monochrome VGA or hercules) monitor, and the application to debug on the main monitor.
MarkMLl:
Largely echoing 440bx... I really can't remember whether the final couple of versions supported a mouse directly. Older versions would work with a TSR (not a driver per se) which converted serial mouse messages into function keys: this long predates USB and MS mice which had their own interface card and it goes to say that it largely predated Windows.
The contenders were IIRC PC-Mouse and Logitech. Both supplied a TSR which I've used, certainly in the Logitech case there was a lot of flexibility (configuration file?). Logitech also had a dedicated programmer's toolkit which contained a lot of what we'd now think of a GUI frontend with message handling etc., and they distributed the excellent Point editor to highlight what could actually be done with a mouse (written in C but with a plugin architecture compatible with almost any language).
FPC's fp text-mode IDE can certainly use a mouse on Linux (provided obviously that the overall desktop environment forwards mouse events to shell sessions), when built from source it uses a library (libgpm) to enable this rather than having any sort of external enabler. It's so long since I've tried it on Windows that I really can't remember.
MarkMLl
marcov:
Yes. You needed a vendor specific driver/tsr for mouse support to implement a certain int ($31 or $33?) that then was used for mouse support, and your main event loop must poll that. The default serial protocol was Microsoft, but Logitech had a different one, as did PS/2. Some TSRs also supported multiple protocols.
Ansi based mouse escape sequences also existed(e.g. in the BBS scene, since it allowed to send mouse clicks over a terminal connection), but were relatively rare and basic.
But iirc TP supported mouse since at least TP 6.0
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