rac@sherpa.UUCP (Roger Cornelius) (10/04/90)
I'm experiencing a problem using vpix 1.2 and SCO UNIX 3.2.2. I know what's causing the problem and I've reported it to SCO, but I have an unsupported video card so I'm hoping someone out there who has a supported card can experiment with this. SCO UNIX 3.2.2 includes a new kernal parameter "TBLNK" which when set to a numeric value other than zero, causes the console screen to blank after that many seconds. A useful feature. Setting TBLNK to zero causes no screen blanking to occur. The problem occurs when TBLNK is non-zero and vpix is started after the screen has been blanked sometime since the machine was booted. When vpix first comes up, things appear normal. But if you hit return at the dos prompt, the cursor drops to the bottom left corner and stays there until vpix is exited. When a command is typed, it is displayed at the proper place on the screen (next to the prompt), but the cursor stays at the bottom left corner. Any graphics program I've tried (couple of games and gif viewers) run normally, EXCEPT (and this is a big except!) graphic data is garbled when displayed. You can issue commands, etc. it's just the screen thats screwed up. This makes vpix unusable for anything using graphics. This problem is directly related to TBLNK blanking the screen, because vpix will work fine after booting the machine, up until the screen is blanked the first time. Setting TBLNK to zero, thus preventing the screen from blanking at all, fixes the problem permanently. If anyone else has noticed this problem I'd appreciate hearing from you. It would also be interesting to see if the problem exists with earlier versions of vpix under SCO UNIX 3.2.2 (provided it's not just my video card causing it). TBLNK can be set/changed via configure, under #6 "Multiscreens". I'm using the ATI VGA Wonder card. -- Roger A. Cornelius rac@sherpa.UUCP uunet!sherpa!rac