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1992-04-15
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15-04-1992
VGA2EPS
=======
A TSR program to store VGA 640x350 or 640x480 screen to an EPS file
Author:
Alpo Värri, DSP Lab., Tampere University of Technology, Finland.
Purpose:
The purpose of VGA2EPS is to capture the screen in the VGA 640x350 or
640x480 sixteen colour mode and store it to a file in Encapsulated
PostScript (EPS) format. This enables a hardcopy of the screen to be
printed using a PostScript compatible printer either directly or
incorporated in another document using a document processing program
which can import EPS files.
Operation and usage:
VGA2EPS is a memory resident program which means that it is first
loaded to memory and later invoked within another program by pressing
a "hotkey". After the memory resident program has completed its
operation, it returns the control to the program from within it was
called.
VGA2EPS is loaded to memory by simply typing VGA2EPS at the DOS
command prompt. If the command line option -R is given, the image
will be stored with the pixels reversed. If the program cannot be
loaded to memory for some reason, it displays an error message and
exits.
VGA2EPS can be activated by pressing the keys Alt, LeftShift and Z
simultaneously. If the computer is not in the 640x350 16 colour mode,
nothing happens. If the computer is in the correct mode, the screen
is captured and stored to the file VGADMP00.EPS in the default drive
and directory. The completion of the operation is signaled with an
audible tone from the PC's speaker. If the default drive has not
enough free space for the file or a file creation error occurs, it
is signaled by a lower tone.
Next time, when Alt-Shift-Z is pressed in the correct mode, the name
of the generated EPS file will be VGADMP01.EPS, etc. continuing until
after the file VGADMP99.EPS. Now the next output file will be named
VGADMP00.EPS again, and the old file, if it exists, will be overwritten.
Note that if you restart VGA2EPS, for example after a boot, the file
VGADMP00.EPS will be overwritten.
The image on screen is coded to two binary levels which means that
the background colour on screen will be white on paper and all the
other colours will show as black. Even with this simple coding method
the size of the output file will be almost 58 kilobytes with the
smaller 640x350 image size.
Application notes:
The program requires that a hardware and software compatible VGA
card is installed in the computer with 256 kilobytes of video RAM
(which seems to be quite minimum standard these days) and it eats less
than 20 kBytes of RAM. The program has been briefly tested on three
different IBM PC AT compatible computers and no bugs have been found
yet. The time to capture the 640x350 screen to a hard disk on a
16 MHz 386-machine was around three seconds. The printouts can
be converted to landscape mode by editing the .EPS file according
to the instructions given in comments. The program can be removed
from memory by using the MARK and RELEASE programs available in
SIMTEL20 and possibly in other FTP sites as well.
The screens of Gem Draw, Gem Paint, HyperSignal and some public
domain programs have been successfully captured using VGA2EPS.
Example of such are included as the files EXADMP99.EPS and AUTHOR.EPS.
The files have been successfully printed alone or incorporated
in a document produced with Ventura Publisher 2.0. Microsoft
Windows 3.0 seems to disable the hotkey from functioning.
Distribution policy:
The program has been released to public domain and nobody is
obliged to pay anything or has right to charge anybody for it. It
can be freely copied as long as it is accompanied with the other
files included in this archive file.
Disclaimer: The program is provided as is without warranty of any
kind, either expressed or implied, etc., etc., why don't you read
the whole story in IBM's manuals.
The program was created using Turbo Pascal, Copyright Borland
International, 1987-1991 and Turbo Professional, Copyright
Turbo Power Software, 1987.