1.5 Hardware notes

Virtual Panels application supports any video card supported by BGI. Virtual Panels core senses video card type during initialization and provides run-time scale adjusting depending on the graphics mode's aspect ratio. So the same application runs with different video cards without recompiling. But using BGI fonts puts some limitations, because the sizes of some objects on the screen depends on the sizes of fonts used for the texts on these objects and that sizes cannot be adjusted. Practical use of Virtual Panels shows that the simultaneous use of the application with such a difference in the aspect ratios as between VGA and EGA high resolution modes is not a problem. This issue will be discussed later in section 5. When you write application for true (three color) white and black modes you have to redefine all colors so that all the details were visible on the screen. And if you use default colors redefinition must be done in Virtual Panels head files too.

Since Virtual Panels uses the run-time loading BGI fonts you must have the necessary fonts on the disk as well as a BGI graphics driver if it wasn't linked in linking time. In this case hard disk is preferable. Otherwise application will be slowed down dramatically because of the constant reloading of the fonts.