Re: Xy under WIN on a laptop, redux {was Re: WinXP/ME}

[Wolfgang Bechstein bechstein@xxxxxxxx]

"J. R. Fox"  wrote:

> Last week, I had occasion to try getting Xy3+ running for someone, under Win-2K
> Professional on a Thinkpad. Couldn't get past a strictly ** 1/2 ** page display,
> and even that with squashed aspect ratio and ugly character display.

(Mimi please also note)

This is a HARDWARE issue caused by the fact that the hard-wired
resolution of the display is higher than the 640x480 DOS screen matrix.
The solution is different depending on the manufacturer and possibly the
model. For IBM Thinkpads, I believe you need to go into the BIOS utility
and enable a parameter called Screen Expansion or similar. On my Compaq,
the key combination Fn-T will toggle to a TFT screen-filling DOS display
with a readable if not terribly beautiful font. On top of that, I use
UltraVision to get a choice of screen fonts for DOS, but that's _not_
the solution for the small DOS screen in the first place.

> More distressing than that was the fact that the keyboard was non-functional,
> starting with basic cursor movement.

I'm not very clear about this, but it sounds like you _may_ need to
construct a KBD file that fits the scan codes of the laptop keyboard.
The cursor keys may be mapped differently from the regular large-size
keyboard. I used to have a utility that showed the scan codes of each
key on a keyboard, but I can't remember the name of it. I think U2 also
includes something along those lines. But beyond that, keyboard behavior
in DOS under Win 2k indeed seems to be something of a can of worms.

Wolfgang Bechstein
bechstein@xxxxxxxx