Leon Win

About

Have I told you how much I was attracted to terminal based GUI? Seeing QBasic and a bunch of other DOS programs at the time made up solely of colourful ASCII line art and blew my mind, and I always wanted to build software that looked similar. I had grand ideas of putting together a toolkit which could be used to build such programs. This is probably the closest I got to making one: a simulated “windows” environment called “Leon Windows”1.

The version of Leon Windows that’s launched on this site is actually version two. This was the most advanced version, and featured mouse support and a proper library that I could actually link against in other programs (you could see an example of the API by launching HELP.BAS and selecting the “Dalogs” option). An earlier 1.0 version is also included. This doesn’t have mouse support — you move the cursor using the arrow keys — but the look-and-feel was established with that version.

Along with this windows “shell” were a bunch of programs which adhered to the look-and-feel, which are listed below. Many of them, those that are marked as “v1” above, were just copy-and-pasted versions of the toolkit, and most of the UI elements, such as the dialogs and drop shadows, were actually hard coded ASCII block characters. The newer ones, marked as “v2” above, did use the toolkit and had elements that were rendered at runtime.

The included programs were:

  • BUILD.BAS — (v2) An attempt to recreate the ability to build a UI similar to Delphi.
  • COMPILE.BAS - (v2) An attempt to build a launcher for a C compiler, similar to the “Make EXE file” dialog in QBasic. This never got beyond what you see here.
  • DRAW.BAS - (v1) An ASCII art drawing program, which is half functional.
  • EXETEST.BAS - (v2) A test to see if a BASIC program using this toolkit could be built as an EXE. I did have success building it at the time, but attempts to run them now just errors out (the version included here is interpreted). This ended up being a good showcase of the toolkit components.
  • HELP.BAS — (v1) What was meant to be the on-board help guide.
  • TIME.BAS — (v2) A clock.
  • WINDOWS.BAS — (v1) Version 1 of the shell.

I did spend some time trying to get this working on F5 To Run. It took a while, trying to get the correct combination of QBasic switches to launch run the BASIC program, but I think it was worth it: just so that it could remain preserved. I would say that the only different with the original is that the “Open” menu only had a Time option, and not the list of programs displayed above.

Also Included

LW2.BAT: — An attempt at a graphical GUI toolkit.


  1. I think at one point it was also called “Lion Windows,” and released by “Lion Software”, which was the software “company” name I came up with. ↩︎