Orlando Llanes wrote:

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On the x86 platform, it is. All variables (global, local and dynamic) and code are in the same segment, and pointers and references are just 32-bit offsets. (On other platforms, there may not be anything like Descriptors, or pointers may have a different size, e.g. 64 bits.)

Cool :) Where can I Get info on the Machine specifics of Alphas? I want to know the low level details like how graphics are displayed, if sound is available, the architecture of the memory (for example: PC has segments, offsets, etc).

Though I can't really give you any information about this, and Peter gave you some, I just want to remak that these things are not actually dependent on the processor, but on the other hardware and the OS. While I don't know if there's more than one hardware architecture with Alphas, I'm quite sure that there are different OS's running on the Alpha.

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Unfortunately, there is something wrong there, namely the declaration of __dpmi_regs. Instead of ShortCard (16 bit unsigned integers on the x86, and the natural translation of the "unsigned short" of dpmi.h), it uses Bytes for the 16-bit registers. Try changing it as below. (I did not check your program, however, because I'm too lazy now to boot DosEmu... ;-)

Doh! It's *always* those dang pesky minor details that are so elusive, the ones that you would never think could possibly go wrong :P One thing tho, I think I tried it using the following declarations (and I changed the sizes accordingly as well):

TYPE DWord = Cardinal(32); Word = Cardinal(16); Byte = Cardinal(8);

So what said Byte previously, I changed to Word, and what was Word previously I changed to DWord. I'll try it again, mayhaps I did something wrong :}

These declarations seem OK, they always guarantee the correct register sizes (in constrast to the other types which are merely a 1-to-1 translation of the types used in the C header; they might be different on other platforms, but then, for DPMI specific code, that's not much of an issue...). However, I would not call it "Word" because in a 32-bit environment, some people would expect a "Word" to have 32 bits (as the built-in Word type does). Perhaps something like "Word16", to avoid possible confusion...

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BTW: "Packed" is (I think) not necessary for this record, because all fields are aligned, anyway, i.e. 32-bit fields are preceeded only by other 32-bit fields, and so on. The original record is a "struct" in dpmi.h, and I think C's "struct"s correspond to non-packed records in Pascal. Is this right?

Does Packed align on a Dword boundary? Or does it lump all the fields together to ensure that they are continuous? I ask because from what I remmeber about Pascal, it's to keep them continuous (the only time in Borin... errr... Standard Pascal that I've seen Packed is for a character array).

Yes, it keeps them together. What I meant is: since the fields are aligned, anyway, even a non-packed array would not insert any gaps, so it doesn't matter here if packed or non-packed. Since the corresponding function was written in C, it has to use non-packed "struct"s, so a non-packed array would be the 1-to-1 translation into Pascal.

Ok, I think I figured out what went wrong. Apparently in C, the way __dpmi_regs is defined is in a way such that the 3 sections (d, x, and h) overlap, but it doens't appear to be overlapping in Pascal. I noticed a quirk with Borland Pascal, and I was wondering if it was present in GPC, when you define a record structure as follows:

TYPE MyRec = RECORD CASE Integer OF 0 : (SomeVar : Integer; SomeVar2 : Integer); 1 : AnotherVar : ARRAY[ 1..2 ] OF Integer; END; END;

Supposedly, you want to tell the compiler to use SomeVar, or AnotherVar as if they were overlapping. An Integer is 16 bits in BP, with that in mind, BP would report 8 when you use SizeOf( MyRec ), logically it should be 4. By overlapping, I mean like a type cast. Is there a way to do this in GPC like C apparently does?

Variant records *are* overlapping in Pascal (both BP and GPC). I don't know what you tried, but the following program gives 8 in GPC and 4 in BP, both as I expected for an overlapping type. program x; TYPE MyRec = RECORD CASE Integer OF 0 : (SomeVar : Integer; SomeVar2 : Integer); 1 : (AnotherVar : ARRAY[ 1..2 ] OF Integer); END; begin writeln(sizeof(myrec)) end. If you still don't get the program working, please post a complete program that tries to set the mode, so we can try it. Kevin A. Foss wrote:

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Is there anything in C that corresponds to packed records in Pascal?

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However there are a lot of caveats, like you can only use integer types, and the behavior if a field crosses a word boundry is implementation defined. So it would take a lot of work to simulate anything but the simplest Packed Pascal records--although I lost where the discussion began so I don't know for what reason you want to pack things in C.

Nothing particular, just curiosity. Thanks for the info. -- Frank Heckenbach, Erlangen, Germany fjf@gmx.de http://home.pages.de/~fjf/links.htm