RE: vDos and microlytics speller

["Carl Distefano" cld@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from =?iso-8859-1?Q?Joaqu=EDn_de_Prada?=
 Mon, 15 Dec 2014 17:49:09 +0000

Joaquín,

> https://github.com/catastrophicanomaly/vDosXY3

Thanks very much for the update and for talking to Jos Schaars about
adding QEMM compatibility to vDosXy. I assume that this will not
address the issue with Xy4 non-US Microlytics spelling dictionaries,
but it is still welcome news for all XyWriters.

I have two questions/concerns:

1) It's not clear to me when I follow the link above what is new and
what is not. All I see in the way of binaries is various DLL files;
I don't see an update to vDos.exe. Can we have more explicit
instructions on what needs to be done to add the "blinkc" option? I
believe that this is the only addition since Edward Mendelson posted
the update to vDos.exe that enabled the window title and euro
options.

2) Some of the descriptive text, and indeed the fork name "vDosXy3"
itself, is misleading insofar as it suggests that the fork is
inapplicable to XyWrite 4 for DOS. I refer in particular to the
statement:

"This fork is ONLY suitable for use with the XY3 text editor. For
all other uses, please use the original vDos found at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdos/.;

This wrongly implies that XyWrite 4 users should use the original
vDos, whereas Xy4, in fact, does NOT work with the original vDos and
DOES work superbly (with the exception of non-US Microlytics
spellers) with the "vDosXy3" fork. I would therefore urge you to
urge Peter to change the fork name to the more generic "vDosXy" and
to update the accompanying text to show that the fork works with
both Xy3 and Xy4 for DOS. I suggest the following:

--
This is a fork of the vDos project by Jos Schaars.

This fork is ONLY suitable for use with the XyWrite DOS word-
processor, Versions 3 and 4 ("Xy-DOS"). For all other uses, please
use the original vDos found at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdos/. vDos itself is derived from
the DOSBox project found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/dosbox/.
The license for this fork is GPLv2 to match the original DOSBOX
project as well as the vDos project.

This fork tracks the master source code of the vDos project and adds
the following features:

*  Implement full IRQ1/INT9 keyboard handling, necessary for all
Xy-DOS functionality to work. NOTE: you can disable this by adding
KBXY3 = OFF to your config.txt.

*  Implement very rough sound support for Xy-DOS. NOTE: you can
disable this by adding BEEPXY3 = OFF to your config.txt.

*  Implement support for short file name versions of long
filenames. NOTE: you can disable this by adding SFN83 = OFF to your
config.txt.

*  Modification by Edward Mendelson for C-Cedilla

*  Modification by Edward Mendelson to set title bar text and icon

*  Optional blinking cursor

Notes on the modified keyboard handling:

You will notice that on the vDos command line, the keyboard layout
is fixed to US. Within Xy-DOS the keyboard will be mapped correctly
by Xy-DOS's keyboard handling routines.

--

Thanks again, Joaquín, for your follow-up on this.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx