Re: XyIII+ in WinXP

[Wolfgang Bechstein bechstein@xxxxxxxx]

Hello Mark,

I like how you are approaching this: quick, hands-on action, trying out
things and getting solutions. Of course, the Flash cards really help too,
don't they?

> Regarding selection of fonts, the selections I make when in windowed
> mode have no effect on the full-screen font; it seems to stay the same
> no matter what.

You have just discovered a basic truth: there are no _Windows_ settings
that you can tweak to change the look of the full-screen DOS font. None.
Nada. Zilch. On that point, Flash is not quite correct. Microsoft of
course "delivers with a selection of fonts" but none of these are
available to the full-screen DOS session (although they immediately come
into play once you Alt-Enter back to windowed mode). The look of the
full-screen session is basically determined by your hardware. There are
utilities such as Tame that can produce a large DOS window that looks
like full screen and offers remarkably flexible control over its
appearance, but they are still _windowed_ sessions.

Howmuchsoever, and all of the above notwithstanding, there _is_
something you can do to the fonts in full-screen mode, only it's not in
any Windows dialog box where you do it. Like Xy itself, this harks back
to the days when DOS was DOS and dat was dat. Even mice were still
largely living underground.

This guy demonstrates it with some flair, and he has the fonts available
for quick and entirely free download:

http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/09/20/dos-fonts/

While many of the fonts in the above collection are good for a quick
laugh but not much more, I am fortunate in owning another long-gone
software gem from DOSe days, a program called Ultravision. This is a
utility and DOS font collection that actually _increases_ the resolution
of the fonts as displayed on the DOS screen (by some feats of hardware
poking magic that are quite beyond my understanding). The improvement is
not as dramatic as going to a real high-resolution display, but it's a
clear step up from plain DOS. I have been using it for yonks, mostly in
conjunction with Windows 98 SE, where it works well indeed, but I am
happy to report that it even works in full-screen DOS sessions under
Windows XP. It does require that the ANSI driver is loaded, though,
which can be done by including the line

device=%systemroot%\system32\ansi.sys

in CONFIG.NT.

The bad news is that Ultravision is not in the public domain and may not
be findable out there. Also, it is quite hardware sensitive and may
behave in different ways on different 'puters. So maybe it's best if you
start with the free DOS stuff from the link above and see how far that
takes you.

XyWrite for me is also first and foremost a writing tool (I use it many
hours per day). As for full screen vs. windowed mode, I employ both and
toggle back and forth at will, depending on my mood and what else I am
doing at the time, but I want both to look their best (and that includes
having a good range of fonts and color choices at one's fingertips).

Best o' luck in tweaking your setup to do just what you need!

Wolfgang Bechstein
bechstein@xxxxxxxx