While dialog based programs are preferable, it may not be economic to convert all existing or custom tailored software to dialogs. Support for character mode programs will allow easier porting of existing Eloquence programs to the Windows platform.

New Functionality

• When eloqcore is executed locally, it now supports character I/O using the Win32 console window. This means that character oriented programs such as Eloquence QUERY can be executed on the local system.

• Eloquence QUERY along with the FORMs utility programs (MFORM, CFORM, PFORM) have been ported to work on the Windows platform.

Limitations

• The CATALOG statement is not supported in the Windows platform. Possible workaround:

      IF SYSID$("s") = "WIN32" THEN
         COMMAND "!dir ..."
      ELSE
         CATALOG ...
      END IF
  

• The CRTCOLS= statement is not implemented yet, an error 880 is returned.

• The blinking and underline video attributes are represented with text colors. This is necessary since the Windows console does not support blinking and underlined text.

• Configuration of text colors is currently not supported. Normal text is displayed black on white background. The Windows console window normally starts up with a black background which can cause undesired flicker when eloqcore switches the background to white. To overcome this, a shortcut to eloqcore.exe should be created where the color preferences can be modified to black text on white background.
  Besides this, the font style and size can also be customized if a shortcut to eloqcore.exe has been created.

• Character I/O does only work if eloqcore is executed on the local system. It is not possible to execute eloqcore on a remote Windows machine and redirect character I/O to the local system.

• On the Windows 9x platform, it is currently not possible to terminate eloqcore by clicking the 'close' button of the eloqcore window or the equivalent 'close' window menu item. To terminate eloqcore, the QUIT statement must be issued.
  This does not apply on the Windows NT platform.

Code Page Mapping

However, on Windows 9x, this is not possible. Instead, the current console code page (which is set by means of the 'mode' command, e.g. in the autoexec.bat system startup file) is used to select an appropriate map file. Currently, the following map files are included:

cp850.map	PC-850 Multilingual (Windows 9x and NT)
cp437.map	PC-8 (Windows 9x, less national characters)
cp1252.map	ISO 8859-1 (Windows 9x, no line drawing characters)

These files are located in the etc subdirectory of your Eloquence installation directory which is usually

  C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\Eloquence.

Installation notes

In order to make use of Eloquence QUERY and the example programs, you should further add the SYSTEM and EXAMPLE volume definitions to your eloq.config file. To do that, either use the Eloquence Configuration Utility or edit the eloq.config file using a text editor (it is located in the etc subdirectory of your Eloquence installation directory):

VOLUME SYSTEM   "C:/Program Files/Hewlett-Packard/Eloquence/share/prog"
VOLUME EXAMPLE  "C:/Program Files/Hewlett-Packard/Eloquence/share/example"