(06-24-2023, 09:12 PM)Dimster Wrote: Love the comment on killing animation.
I was just revealing personal preference. When I was younger, the animations were cool seen a few times but it does get boring especially when they cannot be disabled.
Now I'm not sure if animations were supported on Turbo Vision but otherwise I thought that GUI toolkit for Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ looked cool, better than that for VB-DOS. You had to see the function calls that it required on Pascal because like BASIC, it didn't support an user's subprogram (procedure) with a variable number of parameters. The last parameter, then had to be a function pointer! LOL also wasn't eager for the oversized "OK" and "Cancel" buttons out of VB-DOS and having to use a SELECT CASE to handle the [TAB] order of controls of a dialog. Now I'm not sure about that programming. Probably it was event-driven since the very beginning of Visual Basic.
It was already said that the animation most supported on 16-bit single-core computers was the "pop up" which then became less desireable on Windows before Internet Explorer became more widely used and Google, sp____rs, anti-virus and other complications.
The "dropdown" isn't as difficult as you might think or as much as I might have explained poorly. Just do it one line at a time with a very brief delay as if you were adding menu items on the fly. Lie about how many menu items you actually have while drawing the menu, that's all it is. Harder might be to save the screen contents under the menu. Use an ordinary string variable or array to pick up SCREEN() function results in SCREEN 0, or an array for GET and PUT or maybe even an image handle for graphics screen.
I used to have a Tandy1000HX which originally came with 256KB RAM and bought the expansion board for it to lift it up to 640KB. It had a built-in 3-1/2-inch floppy disk drive and external 5-1/4-inch floppy disk, no hard disk. A neighbor gave me a green monochrome monitor which belonged to some typewriter system or something like that, because otherwise I had to use this large RF modulator to use a television screen as the monitor. Running QuickBASIC v4.5 on that computer was good except one sometimes had to deal with the slow redraws of its screen. The computer was so slow one was able to tell apart the two tones it did as "alert" sound, while on something with Intel i486 CPU the tones were sounded fairly fast one after another. On that Tandy computer I couldn't use [CTRL][BREAK] or any other such key combination to get out of programs. That's where I was forced to program [ESC] to leave programs. If not then... reboot was the only way to get away from an endless loop somewhere. The computer was also slow enough that after the used pressed [F5] to run the program, he/she was able to be able to catch "Binding..." at the status bar and sometimes doing it twice if the program was large enough.