Re: XyWin

[Carl Distefano]

Mike: Thanks for the info. Driver availability increases daily for OS/2 2.1.
And I believe there's a STACKER for OS/2 now, if I remember correctly. Check
it out!


Carl: They sent me XyWin, maybe as a goodwill gesture, I dunno. I installed it just now. Haven't
played with it, but already notice:

nice graphics display

40-line screen in XP|WG, nice

shitty MSWindows "text" font (I don't know whether there's anything out there to replace
this either; I just did a scan on "OEM" on PC-Rockland, which has nnn-Gigabytes of
shareware files, and came up nada -- you had any success?)

UNBELIEVABLY SLOW, & not just in graphics either -- in *any* mode, probably because the text
modes (XP,WG) are just pretend text modes, and are actually graphics. I can hardly BELIEVE the way
screen refreshes dribble down the screen -- it's slower than any BASIC program on an 8088. Is my
setup screwed up or something? I'm wondering. XPL takes forever to execute, especially if its
screen-intensive. Is this the shape of the future? We're supposed to like this?

Some genuine wierdities. When I assign func CC to a key, instead of toggling between GT and GH, it
adds a stop on the "-" System button at top-left. Do you know how to get rid of that
behavior? In fact, can you off that top line, or not?

{{C}} frames (Help4Anything) don't work. The fix? Most XPL is OK, if you fix the IS00 thing...

Occasionally the default keyboard comes back and takes over, even though I'm loading my own keyboard

I got lots and lots and lots of Protection errors when I first installed. I crashed out five times
in the first hour. Maybe I'm getting a grip on it, but that's happening less now (in the second
hour). I also isolated the program (I run it off it's own icon on the OS/2 desktop, and I set
WIN_RUN_MODE to "3.1 Enhanced Compatibility", which means the whole thing is running in a
dedicated Windows session. Seems more stable, but time will tell...

Certain defaults don't seem to want to set and stick. BK keeps toggling back to 1, for no reason I
can see (probably something in a menu). There's a default msg, \688, that I can't get rid of except
by insisting on a different default message (d mg=.) -- yuck.

Sometimes, in graphic mode, I can't see the last few lines of a text. They won't display. The
cursor goes down there, but they're below the bottom of the screen, and CD or PageDown won't show
them...

I think, on account of the speed mainly, that I won't be using this too much. Its quite depressing,
the speed. This is the upgrade path? Whew...