I have neither the time nor the inclination
to start over with a new user interface. I looked
at the GTK+ download site:
Talk about instant turn-off! I dislike very much these longYou will need the GLib, cairo, Pango, ATK, gdk-pixbuf and GTK+ developer packages to build software against GTK+. To run GTK+ programs you will also need the gettext-runtime, fontconfig, freetype, expat, libpng and zlib packages.
.....
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It is possible to use these packages also with Microsoft's compiler. However, [it is difficult!]
lists of dependencies.
Moreover, it says nothing about Windows CE.....it does
say it won't work on older versions of Windows.
I was careful when writing CSBwin to make any and all
operating system interactions very clear and isolated
to a very small piece of the code. It was converted to
run on the macintosh without too much trouble. It
should be no more trouble to convert it to Linux.
If I wanted to convert it to SDL, I think I could do it
in a very straight-forward way. I don't want to do that
right now. The current problem is that the Linux version
does not implement overlays. That is because the
conversion took place one layer too deep - not at the
obvious place that I had provided. This happened
because of the assembly code, in my opinion...I did
not do the conversion and was not told why this took
place. But I am willing to help.
If someone wants to convert CSBwin to use GTK+
(for Linux only or, better yet, for all operating
systems) then I wish them all the best and I promise
to assist. My initial assistance will be to rid
screen.cpp of all assembly language. Further
assistance probably will amount to explanation of
the workings of the OS interface and perhaps some
tweeking of the code to make conversion go more
smoothly. I did this with the people who originally
did the macintosh and Linux conversions. It all
went very well and we got it done. In my opinion,
conversion in this manner, although it is perhaps not
as beautiful as the 'totally-platform-independence'
conversion, would actually require less work.
Certainly less work on my part, an important
consideration.
For a Windows version I insist on the following:
The program shall consist of a single executable
file. No additional libraries will be needed for
the average Windows user. No installation shall
be necessary. Installation shall amount to copying
the executable to some mass-storage device.
Double-click and it runs. Of course, anyone can
make a Windows version that breaks these rules,
but I won't support them.