dosemu vs. dosbox

["Raphael Tennenbaum" raphael@xxxxxxxx]

I've spent a lot of time the last several days getting the XyWrite up to speed on
this Ubuntu boot, with encouraging progress.

First of all, I ran through all kinds of configuration options to try to get Dosbox a
little more pleasing to my eye. Fullscreen just didn't doesn't look sharp enough.
And the only windowed font which I found with good resolution, which happens to
be the default out-of-the-box font, was far too small -- which is disappointing,
because the window is quite bright. However, fullscreen DB, and to a lesser degree
windowed DB, have a very noticeable keyboard lag, and I could find no system
setting to fix this. I guess it's possible, Bob, that if your DB does not lag as mine
does, it's a difference between XY3 and XY4.

I am not sure whether it's simply the fact that DB was invented for games, or that
DE reaches deeper into Linux's command-line guts, but the DE font options,
though relatively few, are much better looking, IMO. And both windowed and
fullscreen Xy sessions accept type instantaneously -- in fact the keyboard timings
for repeating keys can actually get away from your fingers and cause you to
sliiiiiiiiiide across the screen. DE's XyWrite is the fastest I've ever used.

But though I preferred DE, the Ctrl-C problem loomed -- also other keystrokes
which Linux intercepts, such as Alt-F2. Asking on the DE listserve brought a
speedy answer to the latter: System->Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts let me
find the conflicting assignment and disable it, so now I've go Xy's undelete back.

I thought perhaps there was a way to disable Ctrl-C in stty, which is how Linux's
terminal is configured, and there may be, but getting under the hood looked like a
headache. Then a search yielded an old DOS TSR called keystop (kystp110.zip in
www.bookcase.com/library/software/msdos.util.keyboard.html) which seemed at
least worth a try: it loads in either config.sys or autoexec.bat, though using the
latter apparently is preferable since there's less of a chance of another program
knocking it aside. So far, tests have proved encouraging -- spending a number of
minutes hitting Ctrl-C over and over and over, which before would have crashed
DE one out of every six or seven times at least, didn't leave a dent.

I wonder, Paul -- do you have rawkeyboard set on (1) in your dosemu.conf?
Before I installed the TSR, with rawkeyboard switched on, the Ctrl-C problem was
much more severe than what you describe.

Meanwhile I also managed to update the installation to the latest XYWWWEB -- I
am a little late to the party, this is my first XYWWWEB with the registry, and let me
say I'm very impressed and looking forward to catching up with a few years --
already SAVETO has come in handy, since, probably thanks to timing issues, the
STARTUP.INT way of specifying a backup dir wasn't working under DE.

Having the dictionaries and thesauri up are a nice bonus as well. Within a week, I
hope to have everything running smoothly enough to be able to burn the whole
shebang onto a DVD and be able to simply copy it all out the next time I need to.

-rafe t.