VidMgr provides a set of screen drawing, cursor and keyboard routines for text mode MS-DOS, OS/2 and Windows 95/NT applications.
VidMgr began life in March 1996 and provided support for a limited set of DOS and OS/2 compilers. Two months later, the first "official" version was released and provides support for a number of additional compilers, as well as support for 32-bit MS-DOS programs compiled with EMX. A Windows 95/NT module was also added.
Version 1.2, the second public release of the VidMgr library, provided support for internal "timeslicing" (CPU sharing) when polling the keyboard using the vm_kbhit() function in an MS-DOS application. VidMgr now also supports the DESQview "video buffer", although this has not been tested very thoroughly. The C source for these functions can be found in opsys.c.
Version 1.2 of VidMgr also contained a few minor modifications to allow compilation using the Cygnus GNU C compiler for Windows 95/NT.
Version 1.3 corrects a number of minor bugs in the vm_painteol(), vm_cleareol(), vm_paintcleareol() and vm_filleol() functions. The Windows NT module, vmgrwnt.c, now supports the Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right key combinations.
Basic documentation is provided in the file vidmgr.md.
Included in the source code is QuickMenu, a simple text mode program that displays a menu to the user and allow them to run other programs.
The following compilers have been tested building the VidMgr library:
- Borland C++ (16-bit) for DOS 3.1
- Borland C++ (16-bit) for DOS 4.5
- Borland C++ (32-bit) for OS/2 1.0
- Cygnus GNU C (32-bit) for Windows 95/NT b14.0
- DJGPP GNU C (32-bit) for DOS 2.0
- EMX GNU C (32-bit) for OS/2 & DOS 0.9b
- IBM VisualAge C/C++ 3.0 (32-bit) for OS/2
- Microsoft C/C++ (16-bit) for OS/2 6.00a
- Microsoft C/C++ (16-bit) for DOS 8.00c
- Microsoft Quick C (16-bit) for DOS 2.50
- Microsoft Visual C/C++ (16-bit) for DOS 1.52
- WATCOM C/C++ (16-bit & 32-bit) for DOS 9.5
- WATCOM C/C++ (16-bit & 32-bit) for DOS 10.0
- WATCOM C/C++ (32-bit) for OS/2 10.0
- WATCOM C/C++ (32-bit) for Windows 95/NT 10.0
- HI-TECH Pacific C (16-bit) for DOS 7.51
- Symantec C/C++ (16-bit) for DOS 7.0
- Zortech C/C++ (16-bit) for DOS 3.0r4
The VidMgr source code was written by Andrew Clarke and released to the public domain.