The Borland Graphics Interface, also known as BGI, is a graphics library bundled with several Borland

Borland

Borland Software Corporation is a software company first headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, Cupertino, California and finally Austin, Texas. It is now a Micro Focus subsidiary. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.-The 1980s:...

 compilers for the DOS

DOS

DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...

 operating systems. BGI was also used to provide graphics for many other Borland products including the Quattro spreadsheet. The library loaded graphic drivers and fonts from disk in order to provide device independent graphics support. It was possible for the programmer to embed the graphic driver into the executable file by linking the graphic driver as object code with the aid of a utility provided by the compiler. There were graphic drivers for common graphic adapters and printers of that time, such as CGA

Color Graphics Adapter

The Color Graphics Adapter , originally also called the Color/Graphics Adapter or IBM Color/Graphics Monitor Adapter, introduced in 1981, was IBM's first color graphics card, and the first color computer display standard for the IBM PC....

, EGA

Enhanced Graphics Adapter

The Enhanced Graphics Adapter is the IBM PC computer display standard specification which is between CGA and VGA in terms of color and space resolution. Introduced in October 1984 by IBM shortly after its new PC/AT, EGA produces a display of 16 simultaneous colors from a palette of 64 at a...

 and VGA. There also were BGI drivers for some kinds of plotters.

Jordan Hargraphix BGI drivers

In 1994 Jordan Hargraphix Software released SVGA BGI drivers version 5.5 that are compatible with some SVGA hardware like ATI or Cirrus Logic

Cirrus Logic

Cirrus Logic is a fabless semiconductor supplier specializing in analog, mixed-signal, and audio DSP integrated circuits . They are presently headquartered in Austin, Texas. Their audio processors and audio converters are found in many professional audio and consumer entertainment products,...

 cards and VESA

VESA

VESA is an international standards body for computer graphics founded in 1989 by NEC Home Electronics and eight other video display adapter manufacturers.VESA's initial goal was to produce a standard for 800×600 SVGA resolution video displays...

 VBE-compatible cards. Also there are tweaked VGA drivers for non-standard graphic modes supported by VGA by writing directly into its registers, protected mode

Protected mode

In computing, protected mode, also called protected virtual address mode, is an operational mode of x86-compatible central processing units...

 driver versions for Turbo Pascal

Turbo Pascal

Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment for the Pascal programming language running on CP/M, CP/M-86, and DOS, developed by Borland under Philippe Kahn's leadership...

 7.0 and mouse driver (actually cursor handler for unsupported video modes by standard mouse drivers). These drivers were shareware

Shareware

The term shareware is a proprietary software that is provided to users without payment on a trial basis and is often limited by any combination of functionality, availability, or convenience. Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a compact disc included with a...

 and buying them let receiving their source code and technical support; now they are no longer supported and come as abandonware

Abandonware

Abandonware are discontinued products for which no product support is available, or whose copyright ownership may be unclear for various reasons...

. Main bugs are lack of aligning bytes support in VESA TrueColor modes (so TrueColor driver is not suitable for NVidia

NVIDIA

Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...

 graphic cards) and video memory

Video memory

Video memory is a term generally used in computers to describe some form of writable memory, usually RAM, dedicated to the purpose of holding the information necessary for a graphics card to drive a display device...

 bank switching bug in mouse driver (since real mode

Real mode

Real mode, also called real address mode, is an operating mode of 80286 and later x86-compatible CPUs. Real mode is characterized by a 20 bit segmented memory address space and unlimited direct software access to all memory, I/O addresses and peripheral hardware...

addressing space is 1 megabyte, but some video modes require up to 4 megabyte of memory, it is split into 64 kilobyte banks).

External links

• Winbgim, a Windows port of the Borland Graphics Interface
• BOSS Library - A re-implementation of Borland's Graphics Library (BGI) over SDL