You could write your own GUI rather than using a text screen. I had to do that as I was working under OS/2 1.0, which didn't have the Presentation Manager. it did mean providing your own character set (ripped from VGA on DOS in my case) and mouse handing.

Btw, I'd love to know where this idea about no assembler programs on OS/2 came from. There was no problem at all with using MASM, with CodeView to debug on a second screen.

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rbanffy 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Btw, I'd love to know where this idea about no assembler programs on OS/2 came from.

It’s certainly a misunderstanding - nothing prevents someone from writing assembly. Could also be a lack of official documentation on how to make the API calls from assembly. Another possible source is that you can’t access the hardware directly in OS/2, which was more closely associated with low-level programming.

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tengwar2 2 days ago | parent [-]

But you could access the hardware directly. I don't remember the details, but I build a hardware clock running at 10ms cycle time and was able to poll it. Also my build relied fundamentally on reading from a couple of external DAC converters which presented 2 x 10-12 bits for x and y coordinates to some sort of PIO arrangement which I don't now recall. I didn't write a device driver, which I remember as being significantly more difficult (mainly because you couldn't use CodeView).

Just as a brief explanation: this was in the late 80's. I was using a device called an imaging photon detector to detect individual photo events. This was the back end of an early electronic camera running at about ISO 1G. Not a digital camera - the photo events were recorded as analogue xy coordinates, with a resolution of about 400x400 and a photon rate of about 100k/s (not an exact figure - as the rate increased, you lost an increasing number of events due to clash. I had a load of wire-wrap to rearrange the bits before they were presented to the computer (bit-bashing on the 80386/33 wasn't fast enough), then the xy coordinated were presented to some sort of PIO. In some cases I wanted to take video, hence the hardware clock, since the nearest thing available on the PC only ran at something like 13.3Hz and was used for polling the mouse. There was no GUI available at the time, so I built my own.

I don't remember a huge amount of detail, and the source is on 5¼" floppy, but as I remember it none of this was difficult for a very amateur self-taught C/asm programmer. The only significant problem was working out that the OS/2 1.0 documentation of the mouse system lied (it didn't have the display capability claimed, and attempting to use it shut down mouse polling), and third party manuals just copied the lies without testing. That was easy enough to work out, and building a couple of threads to display the mouse cursor was easy.

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rbanffy 16 hours ago | parent [-]

This sounds amazing. How did you read data from the DACs?

	▲	tengwar2 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Unfortunately I don't remember. This was back in the late 80's, so getting on for 40 years back, and while I do have the source code, it's on 5¼" floppy. I just checked eBay, but the only USB floppy drives seem to be in the new-fangled 3½" size. I do remember that the clock that I made was on an ISA card, and presumably so were the DACs. I don't remember any difficulty in reading from them. It may be significant that I was only reading. I think I'm going to see if I can find a service which will read the disk - it would be nice to have the code, though I remember there was a lot of stuff ♯defined out where I would have used SCCS once I had it available - hence it was a bit messy. One little vexation was that although I had a vast 64MB hard disk, and a 1GB (bites tip of little finger) optical WORM drive, I had to reboot in to MS/DOS to use the WORM drive (no OS/2 drivers) and because one of the operating systems couldn't handle more than 32MB disk size, I had to partition the hard disk.

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ForOldHack 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

CodeView? You *must" have been there.

	▲	tengwar2 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Coming from a background of programming bank-switched Z80 code for memory-mapped displays with an 8080 assembler, 80386 code with a full-screen debugger was a dream.