SAC.DYESGPF@E.ISI.EDU (10/24/88)
I have downloaded the evalution version of PAK10 (improved archiving program) and have found a problem (not a bug) with the file EXEMAKER.EXE that makes that program unusable on a z100 in its "native" state. There is an IBM-PC ROM BIOS CALL in a subroutine which begins 4767H bytes into the file and is 20 bytes long. A value is PUSHed before the sub-routine is call, within the routine this value is loaded into AH and then an INT 16H is executed. I haven't tried running EXEMAKER on my Z so I do not know under what conditions this routine would be called. It will result in a wild interrupt which will probably place the machine in an infinite loop and will probably not respond to the keyboard (other than ctrl-reset) since INT 16H is IBM keyboard service. Two of the functions for INT 16H (00 and 01) can be replaced with INT 21H 7 and 6 respectivly; the third function (02) is not readily available (or necessary) on the Z100. So far I see no problem with PAK.EXE my only testing of it so far has been to screen for wild interrupts and "trojan" type messages created and then extracted files to/from and .pak file. One item which may be of concern, when moving files to an archive, the originals are deleted during the process. This could be a "mixed" blessing which everyone needs to be aware off. Al Holecek <SAC.DYESGPF@E.ISI.EDU>