Re: Lost Expanded Memory

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from "Chris Madsen"  on Tue, 4
Nov 2003 14:35:27 -0500

Chris:

> If all you want is to use the UK dictionary instead of
> the US dictionary, you have to first make sure the UK
> dictionary is not corrupted, by looking at the file size.
> If it is ridiculously small, then it is corrupted.
> Replace it with a fresh copy.

But we know, from the very message you quote ("The
procedure worked exactly as you said it would"), that this
is not pertinent: Paul's U.K. DICT.SPL works just fine,
when/if he can get U.K. DICT.SPL installed. Obviously, he
has already tried naming the U.K. speller as DICT.SPL before
launching Xywrite -- his *starting point* is that this
approach doesn't work.

> If you want to switch back and forth, you should be able
> to write a little program that unloads the currently
> loaded DICT.SPL (whichever one it is) and renames the
> desired file.

That's another approach that doesn't work, and never has.
You *cannot* change DICT.SPL within the current DOS session
once it is loaded -- XyWrite simply won't permit it (the COPY
occurs, but when you try to use the replaced DICT.SPL, you
get error #18: "There is not enough memory to perform
function."). You can only use a backdoor: open *another*
DOS session, in a different memory space, and replace the
current DICT.SPL with a new one. Look, I have all the
compatible Microlytics spellers (and many more incompatible
Microlytics spellers), and I've tested this extensively.
If you want to do "live" toggles of dictionaries (U.S. -
U.K. - Deutsch - Italiano - Espanol - Francais) during a
single XyWrite session, you *must* load the U.S. dictionary
first, and then you have to perform the swap "clandestinely"
via a different DOS session. That's simply the way it is.
But it's eminently do-able. In WinNT (=NT, 2K, XP), you
can just use the START command *from XyWrite* to launch a
different DOS session:

 dos/nv/x/z start %COMSPEC% /c copy d:\path\UKDICT.SPL d:\path\DICT.SPL

What's going on here is that XyWrite seems to need to
reserve a space for DICT.SPL, using the U.S. speller as
default, and then the user can sneak a different dictionary
into that space. For reasons unknown to me, this approach
works even though the U.S. dictionary is only 110K, and the
German dictionary for example is 381K.

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