C Language and Libraries Help (clang.hlp) (
Table of Contents;
Topic list)
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you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully
out of date.
Active and Visual Page Functions
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─────Run-Time Library───────────────────────────────────────────────────────
For hardware and mode configurations with enough memory to
support multiple-screen pages, _getactivepage, _getvisualpage,
_setactivepage, and _setvisualpage can be used to manipulate
screen pages. The active page is the video area where text is
written. The visual page is the video area displayed to the user.
When active and visual pages are the same (the default), text
becomes visible when it is written. Screen animation can be done
by writing different text to each active page, then alternating
the visual page.
Use _setactivepage to set the page for output. Use _setvisualpage
to set the page for display. For both functions, the <page>
argument selects the current page. The default page number is 0.
The _getactivepage and _getvisualpage functions can be used to
save the initial pages for later restoration.
These functions only work when text is managed and written with
text output functions: _outtext, _outmem, _settextposition,
_gettextposition, _settextcolor, _gettextcolor, and _wrapon. They
do not work with printf and other standard I/O functions.
The CGA hardware configuration has only 16K of RAM available to
support multiple video pages, and only in text mode. The EGA and
VGA configurations can be equipped with up to 256K of RAM for
multiple video pages in graphics mode. All hardware combinations
support at least one page (page number 0).
Return Value
If successful, _setactivepage and _setvisualpage return the page
number of the previous video page. If one of these functions
fails, it returns -1.
The _getactivepage and _getvisualpage functions return the
current page number.
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