Hello,
I’m currently trying to port a little Win32 console application that is using PDCurses to using ncurses to see if it would fix a problem I have with mvaddch() displaying characters a pixel too short when using colors
(you can follow all my struggle here: http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=5481). After a few tries with the current 5.9 release (20110404), I managed to pull something that works fine (using MinGW). My only problem is that my application displays
wide characters (like 0x2591 for semi-solid blocks) and the 20110404 version doesn’t support wide characters.
Since an experimental wide character support has been implemented in the latest patches, I downloaded the mingw32-20130622 package, plugged the include and lib files in my source code and recompiled. Unfortunately, the
following linker errors occurred:
-
Unresolved external ‘_nodelay’
-
Unresolved external ‘_cbreak’
Removing calls to nodelay() and cbreak() from my code made it compile, but the first call to keypad() crashed the program…
So I decided to recompile ncurses using MinGW from the ncurses-5.9-20130622 archive following the instructions in the README.MinGW file. Here’s the whole procedure I did that worked for me:
-
Download and install TDM-GCC 4.7.1
-
Download and install MSYS 1.0.11
-
Download and unzip LIBTOOL 2.4.2
-
Build LIBTOOL 2.4.2
o
$ ./configure --prefix=/mingw
o
$ make
o
$ make install
-
Download and unzip the latest patch (ncurses-5.9-20130622)
-
Set environment variables (TERM=#win32con and PATH_SEPARATOR=;)
-
Launch MSYS and build NCURSES
o
$ ./configure \
--prefix=/mingw \
--without-cxx \
--without-cxx-binding \
--without-ada \
--enable-warnings \
--enable-assertions \
--enable-reentrant \
--disable-home-terminfo \
--enable-database \
--enable-sp-funcs \
--enable-term-driver \
--enable-interop \
--disable-termcap \
--with-progs \
--with-libtool \
--enable-pc-files \
--enable-widec
o
$ make
-
Create the libncursestw.lib file from libncursestw-5.dll (I’m using BCC to compile my program, so I used implib there)
-
Copy the include and lib files into the include and lib folders of my program
-
Recompile my program using BCC
At this point, things are getting better compared to the mingw32-20130622 package. However, I still get the following linker error:
-
Unresolved external ‘_delwin’
Maybe I’m doing something wrong here? Or forgot something?
Now if I remove the call to delwin() from my code and recompile, the program runs just fine. Except two little bugs. First, the wide characters are not displayed properly, which probably means that the experimental wide
character support isn’t fully working yet. For example, the “semi-solid block” character (
0x2591) is displayed as a “pipe” character (
0x00A6?). And the second bug, which is more annoying, is that mvaddch() is also
displaying characters a pixel too short when using colors (same problem as with PDCurses). This happens completely randomly (see the following picture – this should be a rectangular form displayed with dark yellow solid block characters):
I recall this problem not being present in older patches (sure doesn’t happen with the regular 20110404 release). My last post on angband.oook.cz is from October 15, 2012 and didn’t mention the problem, so this has been
introduced since. Any idea what could be the cause?