Lavender

A simple configurable slideshow program for DOS 2.0+ and Windows 95/NT4+ written mainly in C. It shows slides consisting of text and graphics contained in the ZIP file appended to the executable.

This is still work in progress, but I'm doing my best to separate working version (main branch) from progressing code (PRs).

Current features

• DOS, Windows, and diagnostic Linux targets
• text-based script file format
• graphics mode
  • CGA 640x200 monochrome under DOS
  • EGA 640x350 16-color under DOS using a loadable driver
  • 24-bit RGB under Windows and Linux with user-customizable content size
  • Windows DPI awareness and full screen mode support
• display delays (animations)
  • millisecond resolution
• displaying text (with UTF-8 subset support)
  • under DOS, supports Czech, Polish, and Spanish diacritics, and 0x00-0x1F, 0x7F CP437 special characters
• displaying bitmap images
  • monochrome and 16-color Windows Device Independent Bitmaps (BMP)
  • XRGB8888 Windows Device Independent Bitmaps (BMP) under Windows and Linux
• drawing and filling rectangles
  • 16 colors on Windows, Linux, and DOS with EGA
  • mapped 5 monochrome patterns on DOS with CGA
• MIDI Type 0 music playback
  • PC Speaker (with 3 simulated voices), Yamaha OPL2, Roland MPU-401 UART under DOS, with loadable driver support
  • Windows MME API
  • FluidSynth under Linux
• script nesting
  • plain text or encrypted
  • supported ciphers: XOR, DES, and TDES
  • decryption key stored locally, entered manually, or retrieved remotely (using request and confirmation code, QR and confirmation code, or over HTTP)
• navigation and user input using key presses and mouse clicks
• multiple language support (Czech, English, Polish)
• configurable and localizable AutoRun application for checking Lavender run-time dependecies

Building

Building requires CMake, Python 3 and zip on all hosts. On Linux hosts, GNU Make and GNU Binutils are also required. Cross-compilation for Windows is done using LLVM-MinGW for i486, x86_64, armv7, and aarch64. Cross-compiled i486 Windows target links against libunicows and requires Internet Explorer 5 or newer. Native compilation on Windows requires at least Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 with Windows Server 2003 SP1 Platform SDK. Linux builds rely on SDL2, SDL2_ttf, cURL, Fontconfig, FluidSynth, and libblkid libraries. MS-DOS builds require GCC for IA-16 with libi86.

After acquiring all prerequisities, you can configure the Linux host environment, e. g.:

# Native (diagnostic) Linux build, either GCC or Clang is fine
cmake -S . -B build

# MS-DOS build, COM file (DOS 2+)
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=cmake/DOS-GCC-IA16.cmake -DDOS_TARGET_COM=1

# MS-DOS build, EXE file (DOS 3+)
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=cmake/DOS-GCC-IA16.cmake

# Windows build, IA-32 (Windows 95+)
CC=i686-w64-mingw32-gcc cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME=Windows

# Windows build, x64 (Windows XP+)
CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME=Windows

For the MS-DOS COM build, you can select user interface language (cs-cz, en-us, pl-pl) by adding the -DLAV_LANG= option.

After finishing configuration, navigate to the build directory and run make bundle. An executable called sshow should appear. You can modify the slideshow by editing files in the data directory.