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FatalVision DOS-based GUI library for Turbo Pascal

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FatalVision

What is FatalVision?

FatalVision is a set of Borland Pascal libraries. A set that has been built in years, with hell a lot of effort. A set that developed its own authors while it's being developed. A set that gave us experience. A set that made us men.

Screenshots

These are the tools I wrote using FatalVision, all written by me:

Baston file manager, 1st place winner of Altin Disket 94 Programming Competition in DOS Category:

baston

Context-sensitive hypertext help of Baston:

baston help system screenshot

Wolverine off-line mail reader for FidoNet-style networks:

wolverine 2.30 screenshot

Wolverine context-sensitive hypertext help:

wolverine help

GenAv antivirus:

genav screenshot

History

There's a lot to tell here which will go beyond the purpose of this document, so I will keep it short. It was May 1993 and I (SSG) was workin' on graphical user interfaces. Suat Esen (Wiseman) made an offer to develop a commercial program. I'd be the GUI coder. I accepted and we began. A month later, another coder Meric Sentunali (FatalicA) had started to code a GUI too. He introduced some new techniques which we couldn't stand without adapting our sources to his. So we united. The satisfiying completion of GUI code took about 6 months. But we didn't stop there. We had no other job to do so we coded, and coded whatever came to our minds. At the end of 1994, FatalicA and Wiseman stopped the coding of the GUI. It was almost finished. But I kept retouching it until end of 97. I had released many utilities using that library.

Importance

FatalVision is NOT a technical miracle. It's not even throughly designed. (hey, is it ever designed?) It can never be used by other people since the lack of documentation and terminology conflicts. But, it served us well. I am sure that it was the most advanced user interface library ever created for specific applications for DOS in its time. But I'm gonna give no fuck to prove it or whatever.

So what makes FatalVision special? It's special because WE DID IT. It's special because I owe most of the things I have now to that project. If someone calls me a "coder" now, it's because of that. I can never finish listing the things that project gave me here. So just know it's special.

Tech Details

FatalVision is not a complete replacement library. In fact, it needs TurboVision and BGI interface to work. Why needs TurboVision? Because it's bugfree and why write everything from scratch? Why needs BGI? The same reason.

In the aspect of the performance, FatalVision is good. Because its development mostly done on a 386SX/25 2meg RAM and a 386DX/40 2meg RAM..

The bitmap blit engine has been completely rewritten to achive maximum gfx performance. Other BGI routines were almost the fastest so we chose to trust Borland.

The GUI logic is almost identical to TurboVision. There are TView, TGroup, TWindow objects of FatalVision. (So you can guess why the both names end with "Vision")

Some libraries are independent of the GUI. (Such as XBuf, XIO etc).. The ones that are useless without GUI, are marked in the 00index.txt file of "src" subdirectory.

If you want to see something done with this GUI, download the off line mail reader Wolverine from any Simtel mirror. (e.g. http://simtel.site)

Why Give Away The Code?

Because FatalVision is dead. It's outdated. I'm not developing it anymore. Why they show T-Rex in museums? That's why.

Documentation?

Aha... You are stuck there...

License

FatalVision is public domain. Make commercial apps with it. Make money with it. Copy it. Pirate it. Don't greet us in the apps you did with it.

Copyright (c) 1993,..,1998 Sedat Kapanoglu & Meric Sentunali

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