Re: XyWin not working

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Paul Williams  on
Sun, 12 Aug 2007 17:03:31 +0200


> I have now used the ProcMon facility and I note that NTVDM is
> opening XyWrite and generally working very hard. On the PC where
> XyWin is NOT working I find that it does in fact open it ... and
> then close it. Fascinating!!!

SysInternals' (recently purchased by M$) FileMon and ProcMon are
two of the diagnostic tools I used (as I mentioned) to try to
figure it out, and neither one gave a definitive answer. The
way to do this is to disassemble XW.EXE, and patch it to compel
a JMP to the right address -- that MIGHT do the trick, unless
there are further problems (i.e. XyWin is looking for something,
not finding it, and aborting -- but it would later need to USE
that "something", whatever it is, and still not find it). My
problem is, I don't have a functioning XyWin at present that
would show me where the bloody thing *should* jump when it
works, in order to patch it to force a good JMP -- my XyWins are
busted, on the two machines that have it. My bet, given the DOS
heritage of XyWin, is that it's looking for space in high DOS
memory and not finding it, possibly because USB has usurped that
memory area... Or, possibly, too many GDI objects. Or... a lot
of things, maybe printer-related -- e.g. it could want to use a
specific printer port, and not find it. I just don't know.

NBWin has really taken the wind out of this issue. I'm no
longer motivated to figure it out, because NBWin is so much
better (& less buggy) than XyWin, it's just silly to persist
with XyWin unless you can't afford NB. For users who want
complete interoperability between XyWrite (operating in CodePage
437|850) and NBWin (running in CP1252), check out the TrueType
font CP850.TTF (inside http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/ANSISPL.ZIP)
-- if you install that properly in a Win32 .\FONTS subdirectory,
NBWin will be able to display your Xy4 texts in CP850 instead of
Windows ANSI, i.e. as they were originally written (but not
including chars>255, i.e. Speedo extended chars, which NBWin
simply doesn't understand). CP850.TTF is, by the bye, a unique
font, AFAIK -- there is no other CP850 TrueType font in
existence. It's a Courier typeface.

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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