MA18@SYSE.SALFORD.AC.UK (04/26/88)
Subjects: Users > 15 (thanks), SSTAT, BGii screen driver 1) My thanks to those who kindly explained the niceties of high user numbers- particularly to Jay and Bridger. 2) I recently downloaded SSTAT from simtel20 (file ZSTAT19.LBR I think) and have experienced a couple of problems with it which I would like to pass on for others (a) It is said that it will work 'out of the box' BUT this is not quite true. The initial string which is written to the terminal starts with the hex sequence 1A 17 04 08. On my system this starts loading a soft screen char bit pattern! I imagine the 1A is intended to clear the screen, but I am not sure what the others should do. These can be simply and painlessly patched to some suitable sequence for your terminal. (b) The mechanism which is used to invoke the reverse video does not work if the char sequence that is used to select reverse video contains bytes with the top bit set. This is because there is a common routine which outputs strings to the screen. On detecting a top bit set, calls itself to output the necessary control sequences, which themselves contain bytes with the top bit set, etc. I leave the rest to you imagination... So far I have not been able to overcome this problem without simply disabling this feature, which is a pity as I like the program For those of you who have tried this program it (for me) has the attraction of giving both the allocated file size, and the actual file size. I find this a great help in assessing the benefits to be gained from using libraries - my hard disk has a 16K allocation unit! 3) BGii screen driver. I am in the final stages of testing a screen driver for a British machine (Acorn BBC + Z80 co-processor). I doubt if there will be much interest in such a screen driver, but I can make it available to anyone who would like it. It has been derived from the H19 screen driver which came with my copy of BGii. For those who understand this machine, the driver currentl only works in mode 3 (80x25) not mode 0 (80x32). It is able to save and retore the colours, TERM state and (surprise, surprise) any use of reverse video. -- Tony Addyman