BGui Version 2.0.3

This is a rerelease of the BGui library 1.0 originally made by Dan Huizenga (Skis), released on 9/30/98. His webpage is located at http://www.concentric.net/~Skis/, and his most recent email address is skis@concentric.net.

Section Contents

Why I released the new code unofficially
What is BGui?
BGUI2 License
Screenshot
What are some of the exact changes I have made to the original BGUI?
Latest Changes
Download BGui

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Why I released the new code unofficially:

The reason why I've decided to do this is because the latest version of BGui 1.0 works only in the DJGPP version of Allegro 3.0. Even in the 1.0 original release the drop boxes segfaulted, and there were memory leaks and dereferenced NULL pointers, and the moving windows were very inefficient. I managed to fix these things, and optimize some things here and there as well, which included a total rewrite of the window moving system which now includes buffering and updating options to tweak the performance to your needs.

I've had the code fixed all along as Allegro was updated to the WIP so basically it has been sitting on my hard drive since the summer of 2000 unmodified. I receive requests often when people hear I have a working version -- so now I have decided to formally package and distribute BGui as the author has been unresponsive to my attempts to get him to release an official version.

Note that my main priority was to keep the library functioning correctly (as per its original functions ) and relatively efficent as Allegro moved from DOS to the multi-platform WIP. So although the library functions properly, the quality/correctness/accuracy of the documentation and the "style" of the code have not been improved much since the original version.

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What is BGui?

BGui is a Windows 95 look and feel replacement for the Allegro GUI. The BGui functions are identical in function to their Allegro counterparts (except UNICODE text is not supported in many objects), but the objects appear with a Windows 95 look and feel, rather than the Allegro standard.

Added features include more widgets, including the drop box, and moveable windows with customizable buffering options.

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BGui2 License

BGui2 was recently asked to be packaged in Debian to support a dependancy for a program. During this time the packager, the original author, and I talked about the license, and to make it easier decided to re-release the library under the new license that matches that of Allegro:

BGui is gift-ware. It was created by a number of people working in cooperation, and is given to you freely as a gift. You may use, modify, redistribute, and generally hack it about in any way you like, and you do not have to give us anything in return. However, if you like this product you are encouraged to thank us by making a return gift to the Allegro community. This could be by writing an add-on package, providing a useful bug report, making an improvement to the library, or perhaps just releasing the sources of your program so that other people can learn from them. If you redistribute parts of this code or make a game using it, it would be nice if you mentioned BGUI somewhere in the credits, but you are not required to do this. We trust you not to abuse our generosity.

Screenshot

This screenshot is taken from the BGui test/example program included in the download.

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What are some of the exact changes I made to the original BGUI?

I brought the code to the WIP standards by using gui_mouse_x and gui_mouse_y, and using acquire and release screen functions as these are needed under Windows. The author stated 80% of the code was copied out of Allegro, and this is true, but I removed code where I could and called Allegro routines rather than having their copied code, although I have not catched all of this. Also the widgets I had to work greatly on or rewrite now have Unicode support -- BUT NOTE: MANY OF THE BGUI FUNCTIONS STILL DO NOT HAVE UNICODE SUPPORT. They will have to be all edited to support it. If anyone wants to take on this task, free free to do so, but my main motivation for this project was to get and keep BGUI working.

See the readme.txt file in the download package for more details.

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Latest Changes

changes.txt

BGui v2.0.3 -- 16 Nov 2002:
    Alexandre Pineau:
	Released of the library under a gift-ware license
BGui v2.0.2 -- 20 Jan 2001:
    Jason Winnebeck:
	Quickly added ability for editboxes and listboxes to be D_DISABLED
BGui v2.0.1 -- 19 Oct 2000:
    Jason Winnebeck:
        Reformatted the text files -- they were wrapped to 88 characters, not
        78.  Added .sh and .bat files to convert text types and copy the
        proper makefile to Makefile.

        Fixed btest.c to not lock up in Windows when taking a screen shot.

    Chris de Sousa:
        Added 2 makefiles, 1 for dos and 1 for linux.

        Made a few changes to btest.c to make it compile with glibc,
        the itoa function is not standard, so i used sprintf instead.

        Also changed the structure a bit, sources in src/, docs in /docs,
        libs in /libs.

Download BGui

If you don't have a makefile for your platform:

All of the C source files besides btest.c should be compiled into a static library. The header file you need to include is called tdgui.h.

I am naming the statically linked library "lib/???bgui.???" and "lib/???bguid.???" for the optimized and debug versions, respectively, if you wish to contribute a makefile.

Thanks go out to Chris de Sousa (his website) for the UNIX makefile and the DOS makefile.

BOTH FILES contain the same things:

source code
example/test program
documentation
installation files
MSVC 6 project files
DOS and UNIX makefiles
scripts/batfiles for converting between DOS and UNIX format text

Download files, MS-DOS format text:
This version works on Linux too with fixunix.sh!
bgui2.zip version 2.0.3 (55k)

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