dnanian@uw.com (Dave Nanian) (05/24/91)
This message is likely to only be of interest to those who have or are considering purchasing SoftPC, so if you're not in that group, skip away. As you may know, SoftPC does seem to work, but it has a number of problems you might want to be aware of. The ones I've seen (and verified) are: 1. Using certain applications in 43 line mode (such as Borland C++), the mouse cursor vanishes when moved past line 25. 2. Some keys, such as Alt-u, Alt-e and Alt-n, need to be pressed twice before they're recognized by the DOS application. These seem to be related to the fact that they're accented characters under NeXTstep, but since SoftPC seems to go around everything else, I don't know what's going on here. 3. Printing to a pipe only works the first time you flush the port. Once you've flushed, subsequent output doesn't get sent to the printer: you need to either reboot the SoftPC or quit it and restart to get it going again. 4. SoftPC has problems reading 1.44MB disks on some, but not all, NeXT computers. 5. Screen updates are quite slow, even though computation moves along at an agreeable rate. 6. While SoftPC is running, disk ejects from the Workspace take forever. Freezing or hiding SoftPC speeds them up to the normal rate. Hope this is of interest. I've been working on getting lj2ps, the LaserJet to PostScript translator, working on the NeXT. It's working quite well now, though I don't have all the Manual Feed stuff the way I want it (I haven't figured out how to make pages switch in and out of manual feed, and not the whole document). I'm also trying to figure out how, on a document basis, to get the NeXT not to reverse the pages, since the LaserJet doesn't. As soon as these problems are cleared up, I'm going to put it up on Purdue and announce its availability here. --Dave Nanian (dnanian!uw.com, uunet!uw!dnanian, NeXT Mail Preferred)