A replacement for MessageBox.

[deltarho[1859]]

Ignore the last two posts. It appears that I am not in breach. This was looked at a couple of years ago, but I missed that discussion.

The question is whether a proprietary command is exposed in another language, so the other language can use it directly. I am not doing that. The proprietary commands that I am using are compiled and not accessible to FreeBASIC.

The misunderstanding stems from, for example, “But you may not publish a target program which exports the PowerBASIC ARRAY SORT Command for use with a programming language other than PowerBASIC.” So if a compiled PowerBASIC dll uses ARRAY SORT privately, then it is not being exported and can therefore be used.

The current admin got involved in the discussion, but have yet to clarify their interpretation of the licence.

There was one thing left to do - remove DlgMsgBox from my server. That had not been done and is still there. Fortunately, there was no further work planned.

The lesson to be learned here is: “Do not believe everything adeyblue says.”

[deltarho[1859]]

Well, that was interesting. 608 views and only two members responded; one wanted the source code and the other tried to undermine my efforts on two occasions, having a dig at PowerBASIC on the second occasion.

Nothing changes, does it?

[deltarho[1859]]

New colour scheme for Encrypternet.

I have some encryption code running at 200MiB/sec, but that does encryption and nothing else. Encrypternet is quite busy in comparison. About 100MiB/sec should be OK for most. Decryption is about 7% faster - decryption and hashing is done asynchronously.

That's me gone for a while again.

[Arachnophilia]

Hello David

don't sulk now
608 viewers with 608 questions on this topic.
Is that what you would have wished for?
It was half past twelve at night when they vented their frustration.
And that there is interest in the source code in the community is also understandable.
You should be happy about it. Imortis is not just anyone.
They have shown how the possibilities of Powerbasic can be combined with Freebasic.

I don't find adeyblue's comments very helpful. Quite the opposite. I find the statements disrespectful. Bob was a very capable computer scientist.
There is no denying that much has been lost with his death.
But there is no point in starting a verbal war now.
The world with its current crises is already characterless enough.
With this in mind: ..... pace.

[Imortis]

Well, that was interesting. 608 views and only two members responded; one wanted the source code and the other tried to undermine my efforts on two occasions, having a dig at PowerBASIC on the second occasion.

Nothing changes, does it?

I was curious to see what you were doing and how it was done. I was not aware it was written in PB at first so I assumed FB source code. I have no interest in PB source as I don't have the compiler anymore. I was given a key way back when by Bob when he was still around, but that is long gone.

I still think the project is interesting, but most of my interest in FB these days is of an academic nature. I have a lot going on in the real world that has kept me from doing any recreational coding of any kind, so please don't take my silence as personal.

EDIT: Also, I'm glad I didn't see your request to remove the topic until this morning. It would have been a shame to lose it.

[adeyblue]

Answering someone elses question on how to achieve something similar in Freebasic and making remarks about deficiencies in a different compiler are undermining your efforts?

The hard work is in doing a thing and putting it out there. What happens after that is out of your control. Expecting a reward, either by praise or attention, is only going to disappoint you when those things don't happen - and on the internet that's far more likely that not. That doesn't mean it's of no value or that no-one will ever use it.

Story time!

in 2015 I started documenting everything that had changed in the various incremental builds of Windows between Windows 2000 and Windows XP. I mean, reverse engineering the functions that were added and removed to see what they did, trying to use the technologies that never made it, even down to icon changes. I found and fixed the first proto visual theme that it seemed nobody knew about let alone had seen working, despite these builds being available for years before I came along. All this took weeks or more per video to research and then I had to make a video too.

The most popular of those 16 videos (since it was unsustainable and I lost interest before getting through even a quarter of the timeline) that I advertised in the relevant places, has a total of about 3300 views. They've been on youtube for nine years, one of them contained a genuine new discovery about the history of a thing everybody has used at some point, and the best is 3300 views. That's $%#@. On a different channel I have a gameplay video of driving around in circles for almost three hours using a glitch where you can only see the sky and not the track or other cars, where the description says watching the vid is entirely pointless - in 7 years it has more views than all the Windows videos combined. Where's the justice in that?

And on the other end of the scale, in 2016 I spent several days reverse engineering Gran Turismo 2 for the PlayStation, and ended up making some tools to unpack and repack various versions of the game and documenting some of its data formats. Not immediately, but this lead to people who were interested in modding the game using those tools (or better ones using the things I found as a base) to actually achieve that. I'm not part of their group, I didn't do it for them, they haven't held a parade in my honour (even though they promised ), they just found something I posted online and it turned out that it helped them achieve their goal.
And then in 2019 I got interested in it again, dismantled the format of the background pictures and foreground elements and wrote an editor for those. That led to the modders making even more comprehensive mods and now if you go to the gtplanet forums and look in the GT2 section, there are threads about several mods where I'm credited despite never having interacted with any of these people and now even people with little technical skill can get on board and start dabbling. Far more people pay me to use my commercial apps than have ever even heard of GTVolTools or GMCreator but that's the most positive thing I've ever done on the internet, and it was released to zero fanfare.

TL;DR
“You must show no mercy, nor have any belief whatsoever in how others judge you, for your greatness will silence them all"

Edit: There's a swear filter?

[deltarho[1859]]

@Arachnophilia

Sixteen posts in over eight years, and you take the time out to write here. Thank you.

I don't sulk. The best way to describe me is the tendency to be ill-tempered. Some days I am the 'life and soul'. Bipolar? Possibly, but I am sure that sometimes I appear to be that way.

I suspect that I get on adeyblue's nerves, and with just cause. If it is any consolation, I get on my nerves. adeyblue can look the other way — I cannot.

@imortis

“It would have been a shame to lose it.” [DlgMsgBox]

For the most part, Stuart's code is fairly straightforward, but there is some clever stuff going on as well. Personally, I think DlgMsgBox is a cracking utility and everyone should have a copy in their toolbox. I will never use MessageBox again. Microsoft should have done some work on MessageBox years ago. Yes, we have the TaskDialog family, but there is a bit of a learning curve there and their power is more than most people's needs.

It should be remembered that DlgMsgBox.dll is 32-bit. A 64-bit version would have been available if PowerBASIC had a 64-bit compiler. Whether there will be a 64-bit compiler remains to be seen. I doubt that will ever happen. There is a bug in PBWin 10.04, but it was not fixed; it was removed and the latest version for sale is 10.03. Sales have come to halt, as PowerBASIC's home page has been down for 'maintenance' for some time; long enough to be regarded as ominous. The forum is still live. News from the owners? None.

@adeyblue

There are some deficiencies in PowerBASIC, but not many. I came across one when getting the dll to accept an optional Wstring. It wasn't a bug as such, but I think I was doing something that Bob Zale had not anticipated. A workaround solved the problem, but it took me a while to fathom it out. Bob Zale was a remarkable coder and only produced new versions of his compilers every three or four years. There may have been a few revisions in the first few months, and then nothing until the next version. He was a fanatic in writing robust code. CoderJeff spends a lot of time bug fixing.

“There's a swear filter?”

Yes, it has caught me out a few times.