From: P DOT Waltenberg AT irl DOT cri DOT nz (Peter Waltenberg)
Organization:  Industrial Research Ltd
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Date:          Fri, 19 Aug 1994 10:02:24 GMT+12
Subject:       Followup : getting at text buffer under windows
Reply-To: p DOT waltenberg AT irl DOT cri DOT nz

Thanks to those who replied:

checking for the windir environment variable is a nice
easy test that you are running under windows.

The most workable solution to getting the text on the screen 
under windows has unfortunately been just to use the 
bios calls.

For me this gives acceptable performance and doesn't
cause problems if the DOS box is switched between full
screen and windowed.

As a guideline, my test program which detects whether it's
running  under windows ( text only), or under dos
(text or graphics modes).

1000 text windows open and close:

Mode
DOS text              12   seconds
DOS graphics    191 seconds (640*480 16Colour)
Windows text     (est) > 2000 seconds 
    (couldn't be bothered waiting for the sucker to finish)

This allows the software sitting on top of the windowing
package to run at a tolerable speed, even if it has the misfortune
to be running under windows which is all I need.

PeterW