knudsen@ihlpl.ATT.COM (Knudsen) (11/23/88)
I have some questions about the modem driver and descriptor that come with the commercial The Wiz terminal program. I've learned that WizACIA is a good replacement for ACIAPAK, since the latter was really written as an external terminal driver, not a modem interface. Consequently ACIAPAK often chokes and snags up during telecomputing. I was advised that if I used WizACIA with good old XCom9, my lockup troubles would go away. Well, WizACIA likes to insert one or two "smudge" characters between every received character, no matter what parity settings I try. There is supposedly a "filter" patch to be made to WizACIA to fix this or some other problem. Of course with The Wiz itself, WizACIA buries most of the received characters under smudges, so is really useless. The Readme file with The Wiz says you have to put WizACIA in your boot, you can't just LOAD it. Anyone know how this could be? (The printed manual said you don't have to put it in your boot, but presumably the Readme supersedes that.) Finally, the Readme doc says you can't have both T2 and M2W (WizACIA's version of the RS232 Pak .dd) INIZed at the same time. Makes sense, since you can't have two guys servicing the same interrupt. But they advocate putting both in your bootfile, and say if you never INIZ either one then you don't have to remember to DEINIZ one before using the other. But -- I always thought that any driver/descriptor in the bootfile got INIZed automatically at bootup. So you'd have to DEINIZ one before using the other for sure. Anyone willing to make sense out of this? Anyone ever get WizACIA to work with anything besides The Wiz? With The Wiz? PS: What is the relation, if any, between The Wiz and WizPro? The latter is freeware/shareware, right? PPS: I'll give credit to The Wiz for one thing -- it loads right up and runs under RUNB even though it uses some machine-code subroutines. Few mortals have ever gotten RUNB to work right with such routines, even when preloading them. (There were some tricks posted once, but I missed them.) Maybe Bill Brady's trick is to include each machine-code routine twice in the Wiz binary in different places (amazing what IDENT will tell you). -- Mike Knudsen Bell Labs(AT&T) att!ihlpl!knudsen "Lawyers are like nuclear bombs and PClones. Nobody likes them, but the other guy's got one, so I better get one too."