Re: Using XyWrite with XP OS Was: Re: Xywrite history

[Wolfgang Bechstein bechstein@xxxxxxxx]

"Robert V. Schmidt"  wrote:

> I'm willing to accept the previous opinion that XyWrite doesn't run well
> on laptops because of the way they control the keyboard.

I'm not sure which opinion you are referring to here, but just for the
record, I've been using XyWrite with great success exclusively on
laptops for years and years (lots of different models and brands, and
operating systems including Win 95, 98SE, 2K, and XP). While it is true
that you may have to find out the scan codes used for some keys such as
the arrow and PgUp/Down keys etc. (usually just a matter of running a
utility such as SHOWKEY) and modify your keyboard file accordingly,
XyWrite is perfectly capable of running on laptops (I'm surely not the
only one on this list who can testify to that). And if you connect an
external keyboard, you don't even have to do any remapping.

On the other hand, the hard-wired screen fonts of the laptop's display
when running full-screen DOS can indeed be an issue, as you have found,
but this has nothing to do with Win 98 vs. XP. Rather, you need to look
in the documentation or ask the manufacturer of your laptop whether
there is any way of toggling the way the full-screen text mode display
looks. On some Compaq models I owned, it was simply a matter of hitting
the Fn-T key combination to toggle between a a squished,
scraggly-looking abomination and a quite satisfactory, LCD-filling
full-screen DOS font. Some other laptops I have met had a BIOS setting
that achieved a similar thing. Using a DOS screen font enhancing utility
such as Ultravision (unfortunately long out of circulation and somewhat
hard to find) also works on some laptops. All of this is moot, though,
if you decide to forego full-screen entirely and just stick to windowed
DOS. With the high-resolution screens and fast graphics offered by more
recent laptops, I actually find this modus operandi preferable to the
full-screen DOS I used to love, especially since the font types and
sizes offered by Windows for the DOS box can again be augmented by
third-party offerings.

Wolfgang Bechstein
bechstein@xxxxxxxx