@thomasadam Not thrilled that a lot of the #GUI libraries are dropping #X11 support. I prefer cross platform options and dropping one backend means less portability to environments. I'm switching my own desktop to more lightweight GUI options like #FLTK and #SDL. At least those support X11 for now. #pdcurses also supports X11 via SDL.

One Open-source Project Daily

Public Domain Curses - a curses library for environments that don't fit the termcap/terminfo model, modified and extended from the 'official' version

https://github.com/Bill-Gray/PDCursesMod

#1ospd #opensource #ncurses #pdcurses

(7/7) #pdcurses ( https://pdcurses.org/ ) brings the ease of use of the classic curses library to a wide variety of platforms. It can even use a SDL backend so that you can run pdcurses applications with X Windows, Wayland, Android or anywhere else SDL works. Use BSD #form and #menu libraries with it to add more GUI functionality.

Spending some of my #christmas #vacation #geeking around with #vintagecomputing and getting reacquainted with developing software for #msdos. Last time I did that must have been in the early #90s before I discovered #Linux.

So far I've given the #djgpp C compiler a go, but it seems a little messy and keep throwing internal errors. #OpenWatcom v2 seems promising, but has a horrible way of doing interrupt calls. The #borland suites seems outdated, but does come with a lot of libraries that the others don't have. I don't believe it can generate protected mode executables though.

Im actually only looking to do a couple of simple tools, and perhaps some sort of menu/launcher that can scan recursively for configuration files. For the ladder, word around the campfire is that #pdcurses is pretty good at drawing menus and other components in text mode. I'll investigate! Would be a new experience NOT starting by writing my own library for addressing the text mode screen directly.. AGAIN.. 😜

@BenCollver Hi Ben. I believe we've chatted by email before and I loved your Rogue Class Linux distribution. #pdcurses might be an interesting alternative to a GUI on #FreeDOS. There's also Allegro as an alternative to FLTK. Nano-x used Allegro as a backend library on DOS. What languages/compilers are you using for DOS development?

And if anyone is wondering how I accomplished it. It was pretty simple:

• First thing I added boehm GC library, so my game has a garbage collector now. This gets rid of some of the malloc'd stuff that gets missed for whatever reason.

• I then changed the Simple Dynamic Strings library to use the malloc functions from boehm GC. This got rid of a lot of memory leaks without a noticeable performance impact.

• Next, I added some missing free() calls to some stuff I did with gdbm

• And lastly, I fixed a memory leak in #PDCurses itself where SDL was told not to free a RWop pointer after it was used to load the window icon.

And that was all there was to it. I like to do a maintenance day every other week on my project to catch this sort of stuff. Especially in the early stages where these kinds of problems are easiest to solve.