marwood@DMC-CRC.ARPA (G. J. Marwood) (12/26/87)
I have recently purchased Backgrounder II and, from what I have seen so far, it
should make a very useful addition to my CP/M system. I use an Apple II+ with
a PCPI Applicard. The Backgrounder II swap file resides in the 222K PCPI
Ramdisk and this provides fairly quick "swap" operation (about 1 1/2 seconds).
It may be that I have not yet learned all that I need to about BGII, but two
functions are giving me problems. The JOT function appears to work and I can
enter notes into the notepad, but if I exit from it with the SUSPEND character
and then return again to JOT, the original text which I put in the JOTpad is
not there. The JOTPAD file has been created and exists in the directory, but
listing it (e.g. with "V" from NSWP) confirms that the file does not contain
the entered text. The other difficulty is with the SCREEN function. This only
partially works. If for example I list (while in foreground CP/M) a listing
from NSWP, the printed output from SCREEN or the contentes of a file generated
by SCREEN FILENAME are incomplete and the text is displaced to the right by
about thirty characters. I am suspecting that there may be a problem with the
screen driver (or maybe I don't have my terminal characteristics installed
correctly; though I don't think that this is the problem as other BGII
functions which use most of the terminal control commands seem to work OK).
The driver that I am using is PCPI-VDX.DRV. This was a modification of the
Apple IIe screen driver which has been around for a while.
If anyone can make has had any similar experiences, or can suggest any
solutions, I would appreciate it before I am tempted to dive in to the screen
driver code.
Gordon Marwood