🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5907@iron6.UUCP>, yeates@motcid.UUCP (Tony J Yeates) writes:
> dsampson@x102a.harris-atd.com (sampson david 58163) writes:
> > The windows debugger IS a windows
> >application, and YES!!! you can debug with only one monitor.  However
> >they tell you in the manual that if you're using VGA, they support
> >standard VGA, not super or the psuedo 8514 resolution you can get with
> >the drivers floating around now.
> 
> Pardon my ignorance, but I thought a major benefit of windows applications
> was that they used library routines which make them display-independent.  
> (...or was the author refering to the DOS debugger?).  Other windows
> applications seem to run on anything as long as it has a windows driver..
> whats the deal with the debugger?

Windows does hide the low-level implementation details from a program,
so if the program works on one display device it's likely to do
something at least slightly useful on another display device rather
than just die like some DOS apps that encounter display devices that
they don't know how to deal with.

Unfortunately that's not quite the same as device independence.  It
is quite possible for a Windows program to get hold of the _logical_
structure of the display device;  in fact for advanced graphics it's
practically essential.  For example, Windows allows a program to be
aware of the pixel (width, height, bit planes) and physical (width, 
height, aspect ratio) attributes of the display device;  this allows
you to write programs that can work great on one device and yet do
inappropriate things on another (such as choosing the wrong size
fonts or inappropriate sizes or aspect ratios for various objects,
or relying on colors that don't exist, etc).  This sort of thing 
can mean that although the program does _something_ on a display
device for which it wasn't intended, it doesn't do something very
_useful_.

This isn't to say that that's the usual case with Windows programs;
just that it's possible.  Most Windows programs probably don't have
problems like this, but the more sophisticated programs (graphically
speaking, not necessarily sophisticated in other ways) are the ones
that are more likely to be doing fancy things and are therefore more
likely to have problems.  And of course poorly-written programs of
any level of sophistication will have more problems than well-written
programs.  Even Microsoft isn't immune:  try running Reversi on a
CGA-resolution screen sometime.

Perhaps there are problems of this type with the debugger, or perhaps 
they just don't want to commit themselves to fixing any problems at 
this time because they haven't had the time to test it sufficiently 
for their satisfaction.  Or maybe they're replacing some of the low-
level drivers for the device and haven't written this one yet (shudder),
though offhand I don't see why that should be necessary.

						Bruce C. Wright