DOS ain't dead

Last week, a new point release of Free Pascal came out with mostly bugfixes and updated packages.

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Hello,

Finally, the Free Pascal 3.0.4 release is available from our FTP servers.

Changes that may break backwards compatibility will be documented at:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_3_0_4

For Downloads, please use the FTP server at

ftp://freepascal.stack.nl/pub/mirrors/fpc/dist/3.0.4/

and sourceforge

https://sourceforge.net/projects/freepascal/files/

as much possible.

Enjoy!

The Free Pascal Compiler Team




Free Pascal Compiler

Version 3.0.4
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What's New in 3.0.4
************************************************** ****************************

Free Pascal 3.0.4 is a point release of the 3.0.x fixes branch.

Please also see http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_3.0.4 for a list
of changes that may affect the behaviour of previously working code, and
how to cope with these changes.

Some highlights are:

Packages:

fcl-pdf updates
fcl-passrc updates.
fix traceback on ELF based systems

See http://bugs.freepascal.org/changelog_page.php for the list of reported
bugs which have been fixed in this release.

So is this the end for 3.0.x fixes releases? Will we see 3.0.6? Or will the next release be (I don't know) 3.2.0?

> So is this the end for 3.0.x fixes releases? Will we see 3.0.6? Or will the
> next release be (I don't know) 3.2.0?

As of yet undecided.

This release is useless for me so far.
Why?
In IDE is no debugger support.
Please, we really need the GDB enabled IDE like in FPC 3.0.2

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DOS-u-akbar!

Progress done!
In December I contacted Pierre Mueller which was able to build the debugger enabled IDE for FPC 3.0.0 two years ago.
Yesterday I got response from him. He succesfully compiled debugger enabled IDE for FPC 3.0.4 and provided binaries for testing.
ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/contrib/go32v2/go32v2-ide-with-gdb.zip

There are two exacutables in the archive. FPNOVESA.EXE and FPVESA.EXE.
Both have about 50MB but if you use the Strip utility from FPC (strip -s FPVESA.EXE) the size is reduced to 8MB.
Both have enabled the debugger. The diference between them is support of saving of graphic screen output while tracing.
FPNOVESA can't do it at all (fails even in the legacy VGA modes) and FPVESA can do it for legacy VGA modes but unfortunately not for VESA modes.
This level of support had IDE for FPC 3.0.0 and for 3.0.2
It is quite sufficient for debugging but I just have to say that IDE for FPC 1.0.10 can handle the graphic screen output also for VESA modes.
I am affraid I can't fix it just for the IDE because the complexity is huge and even the compilation is far from trivial. But if someone could make some stub from IDE with the graphic output switching feature to be easy to compile it I could maybe investigate it more deeply and maybe even fix it.

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DOS-u-akbar!

Please, who can, try to test the new build of FPC IDE which could have enabled the proper graphical screen saving and restoring.
But I am affraid that Pierre is wrong and the mentioned compilation directive switches the emulation of text mode in graphic mode.

Bellow our e-mail conversation:
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Hi!
I am on the vacation till sunday so I can't test it now. But I report this on one DOS forum and I hope somebody else will test it.


Hi Ladislav
....
You should try to debug fpvesa.exe directly with go32v2 gdb.exe (without using strip!). This should allow you to get an idea of what is going wrong...
You could also try to do the compilation yourself...

Wait, I re-discovered that the support of VESA graphic modes
is dependent on TESTGRAPHIC conditional, which is only enabled by default
if DEBUG conditional is set.

I added a third version of the IDE into the same zip file.
Could you test fpvesag.exe?

Thanks for the feedback!
Pierre

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DOS-u-akbar!

Hans Otten mentions that Jeff Duntemann (famous for several programming books) is giving away a free (unfinished) e-book/PDF titled FreePascal from Square One. I haven't exactly read much of it yet (277 pages!), but it at least looks interesting.