Re: Refresh rates (XyDos in XP Window)

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

michael.norman@xxxxxxx wrote:

> Robert
> suggests that faster CPU's might be involved. But if you were to try to run
> XyDos in XP on, say, a 333, then would you get the same problem? I'm
> guessing -- only guessing -- that it's the way the OS controls or mitigates
> the hardware and its speed, not the actual speed itself. Thinking this all
> the way through, then, one is led to ask: how is a slow-down utility going
> to help? What's it slowing down? Hardware? Software?

I think we're talking about separate issues here, and that -- as you speculated
-- the XyDos running in W2K or XP is an OS / VDM phenomenon. Nothing like it
occurs in the OS/2 or eCS Dosbox, regardless of what hardware you have. (Robert
identified a *different* issue, involving the speed of certain processes on CPUs
faster than 1Ghz.)

The slowdown type of utilities address another problem, and here's a good
example. I have an OCR program, a 16 bit (meaning it was developed for Win 3.x)
version of Textbridge, from when Xerox had the product, before they sold it to
Scansoft, which folded later versions of it into a suite and utterly ruined it.
I had hoped to keep using this old OCR program, because its OCR engine was quite
good, it was something I had already purchased, and it was proven to run in
OS/2's Win-OS2 subsystem. But, after I upgraded my system from a 200 mhz.
Pentium to a 450, the program no longer worked. On launch, it would crash with a
'Divide Overflow' error. My research indicated that in some cases, this could be
due to a program's being generated with a certain Turbo Pascal compiler. German
hackers had a patch for such programs, but it turned out that Textbridge was
_not_ an example of the TP-caused glitch. In many other cases, the older code
just cannot run successfully on the faster CPUs. I found a very inexpensive
shareware utility for slowing down a CPU, and decided to try it. This required a
fair amount of experimentation, but I verified that it worked -- I could run
Textbridge again -- at least under DOS. (I'm now using an 850 mhz. Pentium.) It
is a system-wide utility, not targeted at a specific app., as Mo'Slow claims to
do. I don't know if the one I have will be allowed to operate under W2K. It
should work under OS/2. But there is a lot of tuning required, involving finding
just the right program values (to be set as you run it from a DOS prompt), and I
haven't gotten around to doing this yet. In the end, I might be better off just
coughing up the hundred bucks to get that PRESTO! OCR, a latter day, 32-bit
program, which someone recommended here a while back. However, that one almost
certainly will not run under OS/2 . . . .

But NO, I don't think slowing down the CPU will be relevant for the Win-32 Dosbox
issue.

Jordan