PRABHA

प्रभा — light. Write Turbo C graphics in VS Code. No DOSBox, no Turbo C install.

Your college lab gives you graphics.h programs. Turbo C is from 1992, DOSBox is fiddly, and neither runs properly on a modern laptop. PRABHA lets you write the same code in VS Code and watch it draw, in a panel next to your editor.

#include <graphics.h>

int main(void)
{
    int gd = DETECT, gm;
    initgraph(&gd, &gm, "");

    setcolor(YELLOW);
    circle(320, 240, 100);
    setfillstyle(SOLID_FILL, LIGHTBLUE);
    floodfill(320, 240, YELLOW);

    getch();
    closegraph();
    return 0;
}

Press Ctrl+Alt+G. That is the whole workflow.

What you need

A C compiler on your PATH — gcc on Windows through MinGW-w64, the Xcode command line tools on macOS, build-essential on Linux. Run PRABHA: Check My Compiler from the command palette and it will tell you what it found.

Nothing else. No BGI driver files, no EGAVGA.BGI, no linker settings.

How it works

graphics.h and conio.h ship with the extension and are put on your include path automatically. Behind them is a complete BGI rasteriser: your program draws into a real framebuffer, exactly as it would have on a VGA card, and the finished picture is sent to the panel.

That matters for the calls that read the screen back. getpixel returns what is actually there. floodfill walks real pixels and stops at real boundaries. XOR_PUT erases what it drew. Programs that animate by drawing and undrawing work the way they did on the original hardware.

What is supported

Shapes — line lineto linerel rectangle circle arc ellipse fillellipse sector pieslice bar bar3d drawpoly fillpoly floodfill putpixel getpixel

Style — setcolor setbkcolor setfillstyle setfillpattern setlinestyle setwritemode setpalette setrgbpalette and the twelve standard fill patterns

Text — outtext outtextxy settextstyle settextjustify setusercharsize textwidth textheight, horizontal and vertical

Screen — initgraph closegraph cleardevice setviewport clearviewport getimage putimage imagesize getmaxx getmaxy

conio — getch getche kbhit clrscr gotoxy textcolor textbackground cprintf delay and the rest

The sixteen EGA colour constants are the real ones, so LIGHTCYAN is the colour you remember.

Using the panel

Hover anywhere on the picture and the status bar shows the coordinate and the colour index under the pointer — useful when a floodfill leaks and you need to find the gap in your outline.

Your program's printf output appears under the picture. When the program calls getch, click the picture and type: the keystroke goes straight to your program. scanf works the same way.

Examples

Run PRABHA: Open an Example for eight working programs, including the ones your lab manual probably asks for: a moving car, DDA line drawing, the midpoint circle algorithm, boundary fill, a bar chart, and an analog clock.

If IntelliSense underlines graphics.h

Run PRABHA: Set Up This Folder for graphics.h. It adds the include path to .vscode/c_cpp_properties.json and the red squiggles go away. Compiling always worked; this only quiets the editor.

Settings

Differences from real Turbo C

Worth knowing before you hand in an assignment:

• The stroked fonts (TRIPLEX_FONT, GOTHIC_FONT and the rest) are drawn with the 8×8 bitmap font scaled up. Sizes are right; letterforms are not.
• setactivepage and setvisualpage are accepted but do nothing. There is one page. Animate with delay instead, which pushes each frame to the panel.
• Text-mode conio calls drive the output area through ANSI codes rather than an 80×25 character buffer, so wherex and wherey always report 1.
• int86, int86x and direct BIOS access are not supported and never will be.

Privacy

PRABHA sends nothing anywhere. Your code is compiled and run on your machine, and the panel has no network access under its content security policy.

Licence

MIT © 2026 Kanak Prabhakar