TC "system" and "setcolor" questions answered

Tim Kuehn timk at xenitec.on.ca
Fri Mar 30 08:44:13 AEST 1990


Talk about quick response! I've gotten quite a few responses to the 
2 questions I posed, 
	1) re: changing the text color on a screen
	2) the return value of "system"

Both of these with respect to the Turbo C env. 

With respect to the first question - the problem is that one has to 
use "cprintf" not "printf" when writing to the console and you want to 
get color text out instead of the default color. Yes, it does say in the 
manual that one should use cprintf, but when it says use functions 
*like* cprintf, I would think other functions would work too. I was 
incorrect in that assumption. Oh well (that's what I get for not reading
the fine print...)

With regards to the question about return value of the "system" call, 
it will always return a TRUE value if it can find the command processor, 
and only if it can't will it return a FALSE. A couple of people 
suggested using "spawn" instead, however, I haven't been able to get 
spawn to run some of the "built-in" commands to DOS (like dir and the 
like). If there's a way to spawn something like that I'd be more than 
willing to punt the system call. 

------

Now for the next questions  - how - in TC - do I put the screen of 
an EGA/VGA into 43/50 line mode (yes - I've read the manual and it
makes no mention of it that I can find!), and having accomplished that, 
how do I move the cursor to a location beyond the 25th line boundary?
I've got another program that puts the screen into 50 line mode on my 
VGA setup, but gotoxy refuses to move the cursor past the 24th line
on the display, and just ignores the command I issue to do so. 
Gettextinfo also reports the display is 25 by 80 when it's in 50 x 80 
mode.

----

Thanks for the comments so far - once I get answers to these quesitons
I should be ok for the rest of what I want to do.

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