DOS to Linux migration library

[Jessel Savory]

Hello Alan,

I personally don't know any DOS to UNIX or LINUX conversion utilities, but
may be able to help.  I've done curses for quite a while.  For remotely
logging in through a modem on a regular phone line, it is the most practical
way.  As we all know, GUI is too slow unless the baud rate is high like in a
networking environment.  I use curses for both and so far haven't run into
applications where a GUI was necessary.  For me curses have killed two birds
with one stone.

I have my own screen library of routines with ncurses.  I have looked into
screen libraries others have done using ncurses, but could never find one
that I liked.  They were all just too complex needing too many parameters
and the screens looked too plain.

In your case, I don't know what kinds of screen functions are being used.
If there aren't too many, I can probably slap together a conversion library
in a matter of minutes using functions from my own library.  If you want me
to do this, let me know.  Just email me the names of the DOS functions with
their arguments and a brief expanation touching on what the function does
and on the arguments being passed.  I can email you the source code or give
it to you on a floppy.

By the way, I'm very interested in LINUX internals such as making device
drivers and anything on the kernel.  Any meeting on these topics?

Jess Savory


----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Dayley" <alandd@mindspring.com>
To: <plug-devel@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us>
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2003 11:16 PM
Subject: DOS to Linux migration library


I have begun an adventure to migrate some DOS applications, written in C, to
be native Linux applications.  In an ideal world, I could just drop the code
in gcc and have it come out executable on the other end.  Of course this is
not going to happen.

A few facts:
- Several of the apps work great under dosemu.  This is a good start but if
any continued development happens, I don't want to continue using "DOS
world"
compilers.
- The applications are pretty vanilla.  ie. Nothing really esoteric for
memory
needs or funky drivers.
- They do use screen/cursor/keyboard control stuff.  For those that remember
the DOS world that would be calls to kbhit(), cursor positioning, etc.

I know that for terminal applications, ncurses is the way to go for cursor
stuff.  I am studying that now.  However, I wondered if anyone has built or
seen a "library" or collection of functions that interfaces the DOS screen
"API" calls into ncurses calls.  I'd rather not build one if it is already
out there.  Any of you heard of such a thing?  I am still looking around.

Alan

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