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Clio client |
Gothik
cabalist
Joined: Aug 21, 2001
Posts: 61
From: London
|  Posted: 01-08-2003 11:07
When browsing my clio folders I found a Curses.dll file in the same folder as the config file etc. Does anyone know if this should be there or what it does, and why its called curses?
cheers
Gothik
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Tabitha
pilgrim
Joined: Aug 19, 2001
Posts: 28
From: 55.9493N, 3.1617W.
| Posted: 01-08-2003 12:32
Quote:
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On 01-08-2003 11:07, Gothik wrote:
When browsing my clio folders I found a Curses.dll file in the same folder as the config file etc. Does anyone know if this should be there or what it does, and why its called curses?
cheers
Gothik
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Gothik,
Yes, it should be there. It is installed when you run the Clio setup program.
The file contains the code that Clio uses for controlling the screen - things like displaying different colours, moving the cursor around, scrolling, etc.
A little history: Clio was originally written as a UNIX program, and then later converted to run under Windows too. Most UNIX systems can support a varity of different screens, each of which needs to be controlled in slightly different ways. Instead of every program having to know how to control every possible type of screen UNIX has a big database describing how each screen works and a set of programming commands - the curses library - which uses that database to handle the screen.
So, for example, any UNIX program that needs to clear the screen can just issue the curses command to 'clear screen' and the curses library will take care of looking up the clear screen command for that hardware in the screen database, and then issue the actual command.
When I added Windows support to Clio, I needed a Windows version of the curses library. There are several of these availble - Clio uses PDCurses (http://pdcurses.sourceforge.net/) with a few local tweaks to handle the scrolling.
The CURSES.DLL file contains the PDCurses code.
As to why it's called 'curses' - it's just a weak pun on 'cursor', I think.
[ This Message was edited by: Tabitha on 01-08-2003 12:34 ]
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Gothik
cabalist
Joined: Aug 21, 2001
Posts: 61
From: London
| Posted: 01-08-2003 13:24
Tabitha,
Thanks for the explanation and the history, it now makes a little more sense. I was beginning to wonder if the curses file was responsible for my poor playing of late, but I guess I'll have to find another excuse for that now..
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