
Bytes of Wisdom e-mag browser source release notes
by MinMax / Septic Productions (spi98@hotmail.com)



1. Introduction
What is this?
This are sources to Bytes of wisdom e-mag browser. Main part was written
by me (Andraz Tori aka MinMax) and is Public Domain.
Septic Productions have long history in writting e-mag browsers. They all 
were ment to be used with our own e-mag (that has the same name Bytes Of 
Wisdom so don't confuse the browser with an e-mag itself).
First two e-mag engines were made for DOS textmode only. One was written 
by Logik and second was written by MinMax. The third engine was again 
written by Logik and it used VBE 1.2 640x480x256 graphics mode unfortunately 
it was not flexible enough to be more widly used.
Now this is the 4th generation e-mag browser!

It's main futures: 

VBE 1.2 & VBE 2.0 graphics mode support (640x480x16bpp & 1.5Mb memory needed)

Text mode support (80x25) (should work on ANY VGA graphics card)

HTML alike input documents (the outlook of articles is determined in real 
time, pictures can be included also some text formatting commands are 
supported)

Multiple fonts support (graphics version only - only 8x16 fonts currently 
supported, but that can be easily changed) 

High portability (C source code. If port to other platform is needed then 
only graphics and keyboard libraries should be rewriten)

High flexibility (we are planning to support other hi-res VBE modes in the 
future and maybe other text modes too)

Free source (you can change it the way you like)

Lot'z of bugs (you can find list of things that should be done at the end of 
this file)

2. Licence
The source that I wrote is Public Domain. That means you can do ANYTHING 
with it, except putting the original thing under some other licence (if you 
make modifications you can change the licence too). Giving proper credis would 
still be nice of you (and you could also send me an e-mail to 
spi98@hotmail.com telling me that source was useful to you).
I am not responsilbe for anything you do with this source or anything this 
source does to you! :)

The parts that i didn't wrote have their own licences.

Watcom keyboard routines have been written by Billy Zelsnack (zelsnack@rmii.com) 
and the exact licence is unknown to me so i assume it is free.

BVBE2 - VBE graphics library by bjt. Library is free for non-comercial use long 
as you want but if you want use it somehow else, contact him at 
blaz@gw2.s-gimb.lj.edus.si

MIDAS Sound System by Sahara Surfers 1.1.2. It is NOT included in this release, 
but you should get it from http://www.s2.org/midas/ (file midas112.zip). It is 
needed for compilation but can be avoided very easily (just change sounds.c). 
It has it's own licence that you must obey. (free for non-comercial use)



3. Source, compilation and tools used
The source can be compiled with Watcom C Compiler 11.0 (Watcom 10.6 should do 
the job well too).
To use this piece of source it is expected you have BOW5.ZIP archive too (so 
you can see it in action)

Naming conventions used in source aren't strict (despite the fact I wanted to 
make everything clear)
Comments can be helpfull (if you find them :)

The editor I used was WATCOM C/C++ MS-DOS IDE Version 2.5 by Drice of Blue 
Pearl (a.k.a. Andreas Thiede) (demo version)
The easyest way to compile the source is to use the same tools as I did. You 
have project file bow5.wcp included (you can load it in editor mentioned before 
and simply build the source).
And run make.bat in bvbe2 directory to make bvbe2 library

4. Additional documentation
There is none... mail me (Spi98@hotmail.com) if you want to know anything.
BTW: try to learn from examples included (full BOW issue #5 'make' files)


5. Things to do...
I spent a lot of time finding bugs... but bugs are out there...
If you have any more questions to ask send them to spi98@hotmail.com. 
(bug reports are welcome too)



Some things that are done in strange way and could (&should) be fixed:

There should be no need to name any files that are loaded in run-time in source
info about that should be moved to cfg file. 

Also resolution determination in real time is needed (multiple res)!

JPG must be used for picture storage... this bmps are just too big

/graph/vos.c:
	Display scrolling scheme should be redone. It should be done the way
	it is done in tos.c for text mode scrolling.

/bowcfg.c
LoadConfig:
	awful reading from configuration files (i had my reasons to do it 
	this way, but they aren't important any more ... got to be fixed)

/graph/loadpic.c:
 	pictures are stored in 8bpp with 8bpp and 16bpp palete -storage 
		it would be easyer to store pictures in 16bpp and faster to
		display them on screen


/graph/vos.c
VOSputpixle:
	calls getdefcolor that calls getcolor with 3 table params
	this could be avoided by using only one table

/tos.c:
	TOS and VOS should be put together so the use would be totaly 
	transparent (no more if (!mtext) conditions in rest of the code)

/graph/filler.c:
	There is a problem.. width of virtual screen is always YRES (not good 
	for text mode... actualy it works only for combination of 640x480 
	graph and 80x25 text mode...)

/graph/simplput.c:
	ALGIN_LEFT should be obeyed.





 