What was that old ASCII menu system creator called?

[audiodane]

There were actually lots of different kinds, I'm sure. One example would be sierra's INSTALL.EXE program that was a color ASCII menu program to change audio settings/etc. Another example would be the old Borland Turbo Pascal or Turbo C++ interface with a "gray bar" across the top with dropdown menu options.

I know this is reaching pretty far out there.. I remember there being old shareware tools out there that would allow creation of those types of interfaces with either C or Pascal, and I was wondering if anybody else remembered those days and what those tools were called...

thanks,
..dane

[Rakeesh]

I have heard about a library called curses, and a 'free' version call ncurses for C.

Beyond that, I never experimented myself with this.

[audiodane]

Thanks Rakeesh, I will do some googling.. I don't think this is the same package that I was looking for, but it may be just (if not more) useful.

thanks!
..dane

[MusicallyInspired]

At one point I set out to program my own ASCII menu system from scratch for my old 486 games. I succeeded but everything is hardcoded. I wanted to try programming it so that it would automatically read a specifically formatted config file instead but that's rather a lot more difficult to figure out. If I ever get that done I'd like to program a built-in config file editor right into the program as well.

[OmerMor]

What you're referring to is Borland's Turbo Vision framework:


The C++ version was released as open source by borland. The code has since been ported to several platforms and can be found here.
The Turbo-Pascal version was never freely released, but there's back-port of the C++ version. Some info about it can be found here.

[audiodane]

TURBO VISION! YES! That's IT!

Thank you so much. It was really killing me that I couldn't remember what it was called.. Yes yes yes ... awesome. SHOULD operate on newer machines too, since it's essentially "text-console-based." Off to try a few things out now. Thanks so much!

..dane