Re: NotaBene DOS 3 question

[Wally Bass wbass@xxxxxxxx]

At 04:44 PM 1/18/08 -0500, Martin Osborne wrote:
> Wally Bass wrote:
> > Well, I'm playing with it now, and the SL option of DEFINE doesn't work
> > for me under XY4.
> > I nearly always run XY3+ in a 50 by 80 window, and have a DEFAULT SL=50
> > entry in STARTUP.INT to make that work.
> The way I get it to work (on XP) is to start XyWrite from a batch file
> that says
> mode con lines=50 before it starts XyWrite. Probably there are other ways.
> On W98 changing the number of lines in the window properties worked, if I
> recall correctly---there was no need for the mode con stuff.
> I can't get a window of *more* than 50 lines, though. It seems that SL
> has a maximum of 50 (which is a pity!).

At 10:24 PM 1/18/08 -0500, Carl Distefano wrote:
> Yes, you've got to make sure that the DOS screen length and width
> settings are the same as the SL and SW settings in Xy. IF SL=50 and
> SW=80, then
>
> mode con: cols=80 lines=50
Well, of course, I had already set the window size to 50x80 using the
Properties-->Layout dialog boxes for the command window.
One of the things that my assembly module (that I mentioned earlier) does
when it starts EDITOR is an INT 10h AX=1130h call, which is the standard
way for a program to check the number of lines on screen. If that call
indicates 50 lines, my module patches the string "STARTUP.INT" in the
EDITOR (v3.57) module to something like "START50.INT", before starting
EDITOR. My START50.INT file then has an SL=50 statement in it, where my
(otherwise identical) STARTUP.INT file does not. This has been the
mechanism that I have used to get EDITOR to automatically adapt to whether
I open it in a 25 line vs. a 50 line window , which are the only two sizes
I use for EDITOR. But the point is, all of this works, so I do know that
both CMD.EXE and COMMAND.COM do correctly report that the screen is 50
lines long.
But I did try doing the mode command just before invoking EDITOR. It's
still intermittent, working less than 1 in 10 times. I get about the same
results whether I'm running under the cmd.exe shell or the command.com
shell. At the moment, all of this is being done under Windows NT 4.0, which
may be part of the problem. So I think that maybe I'll punt relative to
this particular problem until I can try all of this on at least a Win2K system.

Wally Bass