davidsen@steinmetz.UUCP (02/01/86)
I would encourage anyone who has a problem with the floppy drives and a fast
clock to look at all the sources of the problem carefully before slowing down.
I had some of these problems (9 MHz) and tried some patches and stuff without
much luck. I finally found that Sidekick was the cause (or at least part of the problem), since taking it out turned hard failures into perfect operation.
Since Sidekick also craps up the operation of DOS functions 6 and 7 (direct
read), I'm not too unhappy taking it out. To prove that it does this, write a
program with DEBUG doing:
a100
mov ah,7
int 21
g=100,104
With Sidekick out, the values of ALL keys are passed back to the program. With
Sidekick, ^P toggles the printer, ^S stops output, ^Q starts output, and ^C
kills the program. Nobody ever used those keys in an editor, huh? Borland gets
by this in their editor by bypassing the DOS completely and going to the
hardware. This is acceptable in a program for the PC, but making DOS fail is
not!
--
-bill davidsen
seismo!rochester!steinmetz!--\
/ \
ihnp4! unirot ------------->---> crdos1!davidsen
\ /
chinet! ---------------------/ (davidsen@ge-crd.ARPA)
"It seemed like a good idea at the time..."raymund@sci.UUCP (Raymund Galvin) (02/07/86)
In article <645@steinmetz.UUCP>, davidsen@steinmetz.UUCP writes: > ....... > Since Sidekick also craps up the operation of DOS functions 6 and 7 (direct > read), I'm not too unhappy taking it out. > ....... > With Sidekick out, the values of ALL keys are passed back to the program.With > Sidekick, ^P toggles the printer, ^S stops output, ^Q starts output, and ^C > kills the program. Nobody ever used those keys in an editor, huh? > ....... > -bill davidsen > I was bit by this FEATURE while writing a command line editor. Unfortunately, I thought it was a DOS bug. Has anybody noticed similar problems with Borland's Turbo Lightning. How many DOS calls does it break? - Ray Galvin
rde@ukc.ac.uk (R.D.Eager) (02/10/86)
>In article <645@steinmetz.UUCP>, davidsen@steinmetz.UUCP writes: > ....... > Since Sidekick also craps up the operation of DOS functions 6 and 7 (direct > read), I'm not too unhappy taking it out. > ....... > With Sidekick out, the values of ALL keys are passed back to the program.With > Sidekick, ^P toggles the printer, ^S stops output, ^Q starts output, and ^C > kills the program. Nobody ever used those keys in an editor, huh? > ....... > -bill davidsen I just tried out my copy of SideKick (1.56A) and it doesn't exhibit this problem. Was it fixed in later versions or am I missing something? -- Bob Eager rde@ukc.UUCP rde@ukc ...!mcvax!ukc!rde Phone: +44 227 66822 ext 7589
toma@tekchips.UUCP (Tom Almy) (02/10/86)
In article <147@sci.UUCP> raymund@sci.UUCP (Raymund Galvin) writes: >In article <645@steinmetz.UUCP>, davidsen@steinmetz.UUCP writes: >> ....... >> Since Sidekick also craps up the operation of DOS functions 6 and 7 (direct >> read), I'm not too unhappy taking it out. >> ....... >> With Sidekick out, the values of ALL keys are passed back to the program.With >> Sidekick, ^P toggles the printer, ^S stops output, ^Q starts output, and ^C >> kills the program. Nobody ever used those keys in an editor, huh? >> ....... >> -bill davidsen >> >I was bit by this FEATURE while writing a command line editor. >Unfortunately, I thought it was a DOS bug. > >Has anybody noticed similar problems with Borland's Turbo Lightning. >How many DOS calls does it break? > > - Ray Galvin After being bitten by this as well (and having to patch the editor program to get it to work), I was pleasantly surprised to find that this problem does not exist with the version 1.52A which I upgraded to so that I could use Sidekick with an EGA. I have found that sometimes with T.L. if I leave one of its menus and hit control-C (for next screen) too quickly the program (PC-Write in this case) aborts! This could be a PC-Write bug, too. Tom Almy