Borland Graphics Interface

Written in	C++
Type	library or framework

The Borland Graphics Interface, also known as BGI, is a graphics library bundled with several Borland compilers for the DOS operating systems. BGI was also used to provide graphics for many other Borland products including the Quattro spreadsheet. The library loaded graphic drivers and fonts from disk in order to provide device independent graphics support. It was possible for the programmer to embed the graphic driver into the executable file by linking the graphic driver as object code with the aid of a utility provided by the compiler. There were graphic drivers for common graphic adapters and printers of that time, such as CGA, EGA and VGA. There also were BGI drivers for some kinds of plotters.

[edit] Jordan Hargraphix BGI drivers

In 1994 Jordan Hargraphix Software released SVGA BGI drivers version 5.5 that are compatible with some SVGA hardware like ATI or Cirrus Logic cards and VESA VBE-compatible cards. Also there are tweaked VGA drivers for non-standard graphic modes supported by VGA by writing directly into its registers, protected mode driver versions for Turbo Pascal 7.0 and mouse driver (actually cursor handler for unsupported video modes by standard mouse drivers). These drivers were shareware and buying them let receiving their source code and technical support; now they are no longer supported and come as abandonware. Main bugs are lack of aligning bytes support in VESA TrueColor modes (so TrueColor driver is not suitable for NVidia graphic cards) and video memory bank switching bug in mouse driver (since real mode addressing space is 1 megabyte, but some video modes require up to 4 megabyte of memory, it is split into 64 kilobyte banks).

[edit] References

Turbo C++ 3.0 User's Guide. Borland International, Inc. 1992.

Borland C++ Library Reference. Borland International, Inc. 1992.

[edit] External links

• Winbgim, a Windows port of the Borland Graphics Interface
• BOSS Library - A re-implementation of Borland's Graphics Library (BGI) over SDL