IS-DOS - Programmers: UniColor - Standard color settings in the programs of IS-DOS

Category "Programmer's article"


              Eliseev VA


  UniColor - Standard color settings

          programs in IS-DOS.


    In order to standardize procedures for setting colors in 
the IS-DOS programs in recent years have increasingly used the 
standard UniColor, allows you to configure the color

Any program with a universal
Utilities unicolor.com. Therefore, when developing any program 
in the medium IS-DOS is preferable to use these standards to 
help users customize the system. 

    To ensure compatibility with
Standard UniColor all the colors of the program
should be collected in a special table called "vector UniColor".
The structure of this program is extremely
simple:


    The first four bytes are the so-called marker UniColor - a 
sequence of characters UnCo (# 55, # 6E, # 43, # 6F), in which 
the utility unicolor.com determines the location of the vector. 

    The fifth byte contains information about the number of 
available custom colors in the program. 

    Subsequent bytes in an amount determined by the fifth byte 
of the vector represent the color codes in the standard IS-DOS 
format: 

bytes 0 - 2 - color ink
Bytes 3 - 5 - paper color
Byte 6 - Brightness
Byte 7 - shimmer


    Total possible to set custom colors to 16. Subsequently, 
the program necessary colors are transferred from the vector

UniColor a vector corresponding to the window,
or passed as parameters in the
registers of the processor by conventional methods.

Example: code fragment, containing
vector UniColor.

;****************************************

START JR BEGIN

COL DEFM "UnCo"; Marker UniColor

       DEFB # 04; number of colors = 4

       DEFB% 00111000; color box WIN1

       DEFB% 00000001; shadow color WIN1

       DEFB% 00001101; color box WIN2

       DEFB% 00000001; shadow color WIN2

BEGIN LD IX, WIN1; vector W1 in IX

       LD HL, (COL +5); transfer of color

       LD (WIN1 +4), HL; windows and shadows of

                       And the vector UniColor

                       , The vector window W1

       LD IX, WIN2; vector W2 in IX

       LD HL, (COL +5); transfer of color

       LD (WIN2 +4), HL; for WIN2


                ........

WIN1 DEFW # 0415

       DEFW # 0806

       DEFB% 00000000

       DEFB% 00000000

       DEFW # 0000

WIN2 DEFW # 0404

       DEFW # 0806

       DEFB% 00000000

       DEFB% 00000000

       DEFW # 0000

;****************************************