Hi, On Wed, Dec 3, 2025 at 9:09 AM Jim Hall via Freedos-user <[email protected]> wrote: > > Virtual machines are not always perfect, and Borland's Turbo products > used some interesting PC features that not all emulators support (or > if they do, they may not support them well). For example, while I use > QEMU as my virtual machine, the default QEMU behavior does not support > all "corner cases" of classic PCs. One of these is how QEMU manages > the keyboard, which can make any app built with Borland's TurboVision > appear to hang or run really slooooooooowly. QEMU added a fix just a > few years ago, but you have to add this to the QEMU command line: > > -global i8042.kbd-throttle=on > > With that, I can run Borland TurboPascal, TurboC, and TurboC/C++ just > fine in FreeDOS, running on QEMU. (Without that fix, Borland basically > hangs on my system -- or if it runs, there's a really long delay > between keystrokes, which makes it unusable.)
IIRC, when FDAPM is loaded sometimes slows down Borland IDEs. > TurboVision was used across all of Borland's products, including > TurboBASIC. TurboBASIC used TVision? That's news to me. That only came with TP 6 and 7, IIRC. (Well, and TC++ 1.01 or such.) Very popular for a time but somewhat ignored these days. (RHIDE and SETEDIT are super cool, though.) TurboBASIC is seriously old. Maybe a curious old piece of software, but definitely not modern (AFAIK). No shame implied, just that Bob Zale went on to sell his PowerBASIC separately. Heck, there was even a short-lived shareware version called FirstBASIC that was on a few old DOS sites (and works pretty well, no arbitrary memory limits like QB). Sorry, I don't know of a valid URL offhand. I'm no BASIC zealot, but PowerBASIC bragged about a lot of improvements. Unfortunately, Mr. Zale died in 2012, and his company is no longer developing it. Just saying, structured BASIC is an interesting landscape, and it's interesting trying to write simple code that builds with QBasic, FreeBASIC, FirstBASIC, and QB64 "out of the box". (My simple stuff is 99% compatible.) _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
