Re: NotaBene DOS 3 question

[Wally Bass wbass@xxxxxxxx]

At 07:23 PM 1/17/08 -0800, Jordan Fox wrote:
> Also pretty sure that -- somewhere -- I have an old (probably 5.25, and
> perhaps no longer readable) floppy with either a
> TB.Exe or a TextBase.Exe on it. I couldn't tell you what version of
> NB-DOS it may have come from.
In version 3, TB.COM is basically worthless, because it's bound to specific
directories, drives, and options. TBCUSTOM.COM is the one you need -- it
creates customized versions of TB.COM. TBCUSTOM.COM and TB.COM are a binary
match for about the first 21K (the size of TB.COM) except for about 100 or
so bytes that are scattered here and there, and seem to reflect the
personalization. Also, textbase uses five "overlay" files (with filenames
like TBx.OVL).
>  I'm thinking they might well have had some sort of
> "hooks" inside the NB-3 or later EDITORs, in order to
> integrate with the textbase code . . . but that is
> just a non-coding layman's assumption.
For the most part, textbase just seems to be a standalone program, that you
CAN invoke from within NB if you want. But when TB.COM finds a result and
when it has also been invoked from NB, there seems to be an option to dump
the results directly from TB.COM back into an open NB file. They talk about
something called the "transfer buffer," which is 64K max, which is for that
purpose. I think that involves the use of a "hook" that might be generally
useful (a little like the clipboard function), but I've pretty much
concluded that finding any such hook isn't all that easy, and isn't worth
the trouble, given the questionable status of NB3 release of the XyWrite code.

Wally Bass