Raster Master was one of my first programs written inTurbo Pascal 5.5.
It's an icon/sprite editor that allows you to edit very small images
and create the code to add to your own programs. It was originally
released as a shareware program and along with some other programming
utilities it did very well for its time. But that was more than 10
years ago and things have changed, the last release of this program was
released back in 1996 as Freeware.
Over time computers get faster and some programs just stop working. If
you try and run the last DOS version of Raster Master on a recent
computer you will get the Runtime 200 error. There's ways to fix this
but it still not the only problem. Using full screen DOS apps in
Windows has never worked very well. Raster Master uses a VESA
640x480x256 that is not supported in Windows very well and in some
cases the video drivers for Windows screw up so some much that you will
have to reboot your computer. And lets not forget the long file names
that don't work in DOS apps running in windows.
After playing arround with Freepascal for a while it looked like it
wouldn't too much of an effort to port Raster Master to Windows.
Even though this wasn't going to be a true Windows app with standard
controls it was going to solve all the above problems and it would give
me a chance to really test the Freepascal compiler. I decided to use
Freepascal with Wingraph unit, this would also allow me to do side by
side comparisons compiling with Delphi and Wingraph.
After a week of making changes and recoding the file selection dialog
it's done!
For the most part the Freepascal compiler did very well compared to
Delphi 6. I didn't notice any speed difference in the final program...
but it's also not a program that is processing intensive. The delphi
compiled version created smaller exe size even though I tried every
possible compiler switch in Freepascal to reduce the size. I will
provide some additional info later on with experience with Freepascal.
For now download Raster Master 6 - The
Windows Version!