Turbo Vision Utilities


Here is a selection of programming utilities for MS-DOS, specifically Turbo Vision. Since I haven't touched TV since 1994 I can't offer much help if you get stuck. Featured here are:

Borland Turbo Pascal utilities with source

Borland C++ utilities with source

Text in graphics mode

Borland TPH help compiler with partial source

I also warmly recommend David Baldwin's Dialog Design.

TVToys

TVToys is a package for Turbo Vision programmers using Turbo Pascal 7.0. The package includes a better HelpFile with back tracking and easy interfacing to special help pages, on the fly extended video mode support for virtually all EGA/VGA cards, Video7 and VESA support, font and palette changing, a mouse cursor remedy for extended video modes, serial stream, COM dialog, serial demo and more...

Tools dialog added in this previously unreleased version. Unfortunately it wasn't quite finished, there's one problem left which I think has to do with empty tools lists.

Full source, documentation and four demo programs included. Works in real and protected mode. Free.

Download TVToys06 (115 KB)

Read the list of known bugs.

MultiDialog

Here's some code that demonstrates how you could change the contents of a dialog in response to user actions, much like the tabbed dialogs now common in Windows.

Full source and one demo program included. Free.

Download MultiDialog (4 KB)

TextStream

Ever felt that the built in Text file type is slow at reading text files? Ever looked at the implementation? You were right, it is slow. Data gets copied several times before it ends up where you want it. Here is an assembly implementation that only copies once.

Full source included. For a demo, see FreeHC. Free.

Download TextStream (2 KB)

TVToyc

TVToyc is a package for Turbo Vision programmers using Borland C++. The package includes a better Help viewer with back tracking and easy interfacing to special help pages, on the fly extended video mode support for virtually all EGA/VGA cards, Video7 and VESA support. Full source and a demo program included.

This is a port of the first release of TVToys. I never updated it and no one ever asked me to. Not easy to get started with.

Full source, documentation and a demo program included. Works only in real mode. Free.

Download TVToyc (35 KB)

Old TVGraph Improvement

I can't believe I wrote this! There used to be a demo on the internet, tvg103.zip, with full accompanying full source, tvg103_s.zip, from MindWare Australia. I found the demo interesting enough, imagine seeing your average text program run in graphics mode! But the code that drew the characters onto the screen was very far from optimal so I spent some time improving things. This is for assembler and EGA/VGA afficinados.

Since then several similar products have emerged and I believe MindWare's later versions made full use of VESA, with graphics libraries included and similar support for Borland C++. It is possible that you can contact them here.

Partial source included. Free.

Download Faster TVGraph (5 KB)

FreeHC

FreeHC is a help compiler that produces .TPH files, the format which all the Borland tools for DOS use. The source syntax is an appealing superset of Turbo Vision's help compiler TVHC's syntax.

Executable file, documentation, demo and parsing source included. The rest of the source is available from Duncan Murdoch. Everything included is free.

Download FreeHC (44 KB)