RE How XyWrite handles keystrokes

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

A very good question, but one also has to consider how modern hardware
and opsyses handle them. We've heard about the keyboard and screen
coordination problems in XP and (until the last patch) 2K. When I was
playing around with Xy III, I just discovered that with Scroll Lock
turned on (Yes, yes, I know: shouldn't do it. I was lazy. Mea culpa), BC
puts your cursor on the command line; it DOESN'T embed func BC in your
program file. Other keystrokes (e.g., CTRL-end) do embed the
corresponding functions (BF in that case). That, I should point out, was
under W98 SE. Xy was written in Assembler, which should mean that it
writes directly to the hardware. But 32-bit Win takes control of
hardware--esp. since the advent of ATX power, APM (Advanced Power
Management), and even more so, ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power
Interface), by which the opsys can override the BIOS--in ways that DOS
never dreamed of.

By the by, remember my struggle to get error beeps in Xy on my new
machine? I still cannot get them, BUT dBase 5 for DOS, equally a DOS app,
and in fact older (install on the original floppies is dated 6/24/94 to
Editor.exe's 5/8/95) can generate beeps (it uses them to notify you when
a field is full when you're filling out a screen form). It does not, one
should note, use the external speakers (and sound card and Windows' sound
system) but the tinny little internal speaker. The whole interaction of
DOS apps, Redmond rubbish, and hardware is enormously complex--and
probably a lot of the answers are proprietary info.
Patricia