Re: TAME [was: Hardware ID (was Completely Off-Topic)]

[Michael Norman michael.norman@xxxxxxxx]

At 01:35 PM 10/3/2006, Si Wright wrote:
> The fonts are still a deal-breaker for me. Here are some that aren't
> spaced out, as well as the Che fonts:
I understand, Jon. As I said, I bought a well-articulated courier
font (from Fontcraft) for the TAME console and run it in bold. It was
relatively cheap, but finding it was not. I had to buy and test
several fonts. Like you, I spend so much time staring at the screen,
I always put screen issues first, and most of my hardware/software
decisions begin there. But I must say, TAME, with some experimenting,
can produce clean, crisp text. You have to keep testing and trying.
[For the record, I'm on XPPro/SP2 with a Matrox Millennium P650 card.
I bought it for the anti-aliasing. Turns out, XP ClearType actually
does a better job on its own and I don't invoke the card's
anti-aliasing, but its basic performance is much better than the ATI
card that came with the machine. (MS says it plans to release five
new fonts -- this year, I think -- designed to take advantage of
ClearType's font rendering.) My monitor is a SONY SDM-HS75P (17-inch)
running on DVI-D. (I really like Sony's Xbrite glossy display;
renders text beautifully.]

I assume you've tried Harry's Numlock fix. Should work.
> Also, holding Delete is slower--I suppose I'd need to change the Key
> Repeat Rate. Switching in and out of Insert mode sometimes hesitates
> for a few seconds instead of working instantly.

Here again is the fix for the delete key repeat:

/KeyGroupDef GroupName = Custom1
   RepeatChannel=BIOS RepeatRate=25
   IncludeScan=#53   ;** DEl   ...
Now take a look in Tame
5.1\Settings\Templates\UserOptions.Template.Tam. At the bottom of the
file are more repeat-rate key settings. Try taking that whole section
and putting in your Xywrite.app.tam file. Might take care of the
insert key lag. If not, please drop David Thomas a quick note about it.
> Michael, for me Screen Layout sometimes provides extra lines,
> sometimes scrunches letter together (though not in a useful way) and
> sometimes makes no change (all after going back into DOS and adding
> an "x" in the text where the cursor was).
This could be a WIN problem. Worth a look. Is your DPI setting (right
click black section of desktop->Properties->General tab) 120 or
higher? Lower it and see what happens. Mine's 120 and I have issues
with a number of programs, but I like the larger fonts. It does not
affect TAME on my system.
>  Text Aspect Ratio works on some of the useful fonts--moving
> letters slightly to resize the window, but still readable--and,
> unfortunately, has no effect on most others I tried.
Try manually resizing the window and watch what happens to the fonts
and the letting and kerning.
> The Thesaurus/NumLock situation, which I hadn't correctly described
> before, is odd. It always pops up fine (I use CTRL-T), and on the
> first uses the cursor moves properly through the list of synonyms
> from the arrow keys. But eventually it doesn't, and either it only
> moves if NumLock is on or NumLock has to be toggled.
Okay. Put the numlock setting in Xywrite.app.tam first, then use the
number pad keys to manipulate the thesaurus. I don't like that
thesaurus, but got in the habit of invoking it. I use two desk
thesauri, but still reflexively call up the electronic edition.
Robert, I'm sure, has offered an electronic alternative. Anyway, the
number keypad is the control.
> For instance: After having it work correctly for a while now, I
> CLIPped this email text and pasted it into my Yahoo mail
> window. Had to toggle NumLock when I returned to XyWrite.
I've stuck with U2's CLIP instead of using the WIN clipboard in TAME.
No good technical reason, just wanted to keep the same setup. Works
fine now [Let us know if the numlock setting solves the CLIP
problem], which is ironic, because that issue caused me to give up
TAME 4.x and stay much too long with two W98 machines that prevented
me from using some software I really needed. And that's the bottom
line to all this: TAME allowed me to move to XP. Now just when we get
the thing working, along comes Vista.
PS: Last week I wrote to Mark Russinovich, a Technical Fellow in the
Platform and Services Division at Microsoft. Mark is known widely as
the author of the Sysinternals collection of free utilities,
wonderful stuff. I asked him if he -- or anyone he knew -- was
planning to write a utility to allow 16-bit programs to work in Vista
(I did not distinguish between 32 and 64-bit versions). Alas, he said, no.
Michael Norman