VB6 Routine
Name: Thoas
Status: Student
Age: 40s
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: Around 1999
Question:
I have been through the advanced class of Visual Basic 6,
looked in as
many books as I could find, went to Microsoft's technet on the web and
the best answer that I received was to not do it. Stupid!
I am looking for a way in VB6 to auto-detect screen pixels (640 x 480)
and color depth. There must be a way.
Replies:
First of all, I have to agree that attempting to change your code based what
the user has set up as their screen resolution and pixel depth is not a
profitable endeavor. There are more than 25 different resolutions you would
have to account for.
That said, hopefully here is some help in getting what you need.
You need to call a windows function which is stored in a .dll, called
GetDeviceCaps.
This is how it would look like in C.
// Find out how many colors their desktop is set to HDC
hdc = GetDC(NULL);
bpp = GetDeviceCaps(hdc, PLANES) * GetDeviceCaps(hdc, BITSPIXEL);
ReleaseDC(NULL, hdc);
width = GetDeviceCaps(hdc, HORZRES);
height = GetDeviceCaps(hdc, VERTRES);
For visual basic, you will still want to call the same GetDeviceCaps
function.
From the MSDN Documentation:
Passing Properties- Properties must be passed by value. If an argument is declared with ByVal, you can pass the property directly. For example, you can determine the
dimensions of the screen or printer in pixels with this procedure:
Declare Function GetDeviceCaps Lib "gdi32" Alias _
"GetDeviceCaps" (ByVal hdc As Long, _
ByVal nIndex As Long) As Long
You can also pass the hDC property of a form or the Printer object to this
procedure to obtain the number of colors supported by the screen or the
currently selected printer. For example:
Private Sub Form_Click ()
Const PLANES = 14, BITS = 12
Print "Screen colors ";
Print GetDeviceCaps(hDC, PLANES)* 2 ^ _
GetDeviceCaps(hDC, BITS)
Print "Printer colors ";
Print GetDeviceCaps(Printer.hDC, PLANES) * _
2 ^ GetDeviceCaps(Printer.hDC, BITS)
End Sub
Some constants that you will need:
Const HORZRES = 8
Const VERTRES = 10
Const BITSPIXEL = 12
Const PLANES = 14
Const NULL = 0
Also, you will need to declare the GetDC and ReleaseDC functions
Declare Function GetDC Lib "user32" (ByVal hWnd As Long) As Long
Declare Function ReleaseDC Lib "user32" (ByVal hWnd As Long,
ByVal hDC As Long) As Long
Dim hDC As Long
hDC = GetDC(0)
ReleaseDC 0, hDC
End Sub
I hope this helps you with your problem.
--Eric Tolman
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