Re: Lost Expanded Memory

["Chris Madsen" cmadsen@xxxxxxxx]

OK. As I said, I don't have the other dictionaries to test. I was speaking
from my experience with DICT.SPL. I bow to the master.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Holmgren" 
To: 
Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2003 10:56 PM
Subject: Re: Lost Expanded Memory


> ** 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
> -----------------------------
>
>