Installing Gold "Blow you bugles over the rich dead! There's none of these so lonely and poor of old But, dying, has made us rarer than gold" Rupert Brooks, The Dead, 1887-1915 Installing the Toolkit This chapter describes how to install Gold and how to configure the compiler to make the best use of Gold. Note that Gold is available in a variety of disk formats. Regardless of the density or number of diskettes, the installation process is the same. The Installation Files Each registered copy of Gold includes the following files: INSTALL.EXE The main install program INSTALL.INI Initialization file used by the install program INSTALL.001 GOLD source code, part 1 INSTALL.002 GOLD source code, part 2 INSTALL.003 Demo programs INSTALL.004 ASCII Documentation INSTALL.005 On-Line Help GOLDREAD.ME Tips, hints and last minute notes Diskette 1 includes the entire installation program along with its associated .INI file. The installation program must be used to automatically install the Gold onto a local drive. During the installation, you will be prompted to select which components you want installed, as well as the target directories where the files will be placed. Install will not modify your AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS files. The installation program was written using Gold! Using the Install Program At the DOS prompt, type A:INSTALL (or whichever drive/path contains the INSTALL executable) and press Enter. A welcome dialog is displayed. Select the OK button to proceeed, or Cancel to abort the installation. Continuing presents you with the OPTIONS screen which allows you to select individual installation options (see figure 2.1 below). You may tab between fields or use a mouse to move from field to field. Installation Options The default destination drive has been set to drive C. With the destination drive field active, you may alter this by pressing the down cursor key or clicking on the down arrow. A list of available drives is displayed. Use the up and down cursor keys to highlight the appropriate drive and press enter or double click on a drive. The available space for this drive will be determined and updated in the appropriate field on screen. Selecting a floppy drive or a CDROM drive will return the available space equal to -1. This indicates that the drive cannot be written to. The options check box fields permit you to select which elements of Gold will be installed. The four sections are: Source Code Demonstration programs Documentation in ASCII form Custom On-Line help Each time an item's selection state is changed, the required space field is updated to indicate how much space will be needed to install all the options you have selected. Be sure you have enough space for the selected options. At this point you may abort the installation by selecting the abort button or you may select the Next button to continue to the Destination screen (see figure 2.2. below). Destination Options If you modify any part of the source code subdirectory prior to leaving the field, each optional subdirectory will reflect the same changes. This behavious only occurs the first time you leave the field. Don't worry if the subdirectories don't currently exist on your hard drive, as the installation program will create them for you. If you have a change of heart here you may return to the Options screen and make modifications before proceeding by selecting the Prev button. When you are satisfied with all the options and destinations you have chosen, select the Install button and the installation program will do the rest. The progress of the installation is displayed for you during the remainder of the installation. Finally, the GOLDREAD.ME file is presented to keep you informed of all the last minute notes and some tips that we have learned along the way. That's it. Installation complete! Installing the On-Line Help The On-Line Help provided with Gold is a compiled help file designed specifically to be integrated with Borland Pascal version 7. After being properly installed, Gold's on-line help operates as a part of the IDE help system. Move the compiled help file, TTTGOLD.TPH, to the directory in which BP.EXE is located (typically \BP\BIN). Run Borland Pascal and select the Help menu. Select FILES... from this menu. From the file selection dialog which has now appeared, select TTTGOLD.TPH and press OK. Your specific configuration may effect your ability to load and use TTTGOLD.TPH. The GOLD On-line Help contains extensive information on over 700 Pascal routines designed to speed up your development time. As you attempt to install TTTGOLD.TPH, you may receive a message indicating that the help index is too large. To resolve this, return to the HELP, FILES... dialog and deselect some of the help files that you may not need. Borland has included several help features that you may not use on a regular basis. Be sure to save these options so that the help file will load each time you use the environment. Configuring the Compiler To successfully develop applications with Gold you need to ensure that overflow checking is disabled, and that complete boolean evaluation is disabled. These options can be set from the Compiler Options menu, or by using the {$Q-} and {$B-} directives, respectively. Gold stores all the compiler switches in the include file GOLDFLAGS.INC. This file should be included in all your applications and units. (See the next chapter for further discussion of compiler directives). Running the Demos Each demo program is designed to demonstrate a specific aspect of using Gold. They are designed to educate the developer, not to show off! Each unit has its own set of demos and each is named accordingly with this in mind. If you encounter problems during the development of your application, you may find that your best source of information is the demo programs, where you can see the particular routine in action. DEMOVIEW.PAS helps you to quickly browse the demo file names while displaying the demo description. You may optionally view the source code of the selected demo. Another demo, DEMRD8.PAS, provides a means of previewing and selecting color combinations for your applications and returns the color number that may be used in the toolkit routines. DEMWIN2.PAS is an excellent program that allows you to preview all the window styles and border combinations to predetermine what might be included in your programs. Take the time to run all the demos. I guarantee you'll learn something.