Sounds fascinating, Carl. I've always had problems with the DOS or DO commands, especially when (in days long gone) I was running TameDOS.
I will play with it when I have a clear hour.
Regards,
Harry
Sunday, May 12, 2024, 11:46:46 PM, you wrote:
Since the dawn of the era of XyWrite running in a DOS emulator
under 64-bit Windows -- an era that I date back to late 2014
when Peter a/k/a CatastrophicAnomaly released his vDos fork
that (finally!) supported XyWrite's idiosyncratic keyboard
handling -- I've been fairly obsessed with making XyWrite for
DOS (chiefly, XyWrite 4) interoperable with the Windows OpSys
and its many applications. Fortunately for all of us, Wengier
came along with vDos-LFN/vDosPlus and, later, DOSBox-X, which
raised that interoperability to new heights.
All along, however, the stern gatekeeper to the
XyWrite-Windows passageway has been XyWrite's DOS command, by
which XyWrite "shells" to DOS and thence, thanks to DOS
emulation under Windows, to Windows itself. It's a fairly
touchy command -- in some environments "DOS /C
<Windows_command>" will take you to Windows while others
require "DOS /C cmd.exe /c <Windows_command>", and it imposes
memory burdens on XyWrite by loading a secondary copy of DOS,
which then (if you're lucky) invokes cmd.exe on top of
everything else. For a long time I've wished there were another way.
Recently I came up with a method that bypasses the DOS
command, with pretty-good results in my early testing. I call
it Winstart, and I offer it here for evaluation. The best
implementation of it is in the XyWWWeb U2 for XyWrite 4, but
I've also developed a generic version that runs in XyWrite III+ and in XyWrite 4 without U2.
You can read more about it here:
https://ammaze.net/xywwweb/dls/WINSTART.TXT
The generic package is available for download here:
https://ammaze.net/xywwweb/dls/winstart.zip
Interested Jumbo U2 users will be better off installing the
latest version of U2 (dated 2024-05-11), available at the XyWWWeb home page:
http://xywrite.org/xywwweb/
The changelog describes Winstart for U2 and other routines
that I've either recently added or updated:
https://ammaze.net/xywwweb/dls/change.lgopdf
This is all rather recent and experimental, so try it, if
you're so inclined, with an open mind and a healthy grano
salis. As always, your comments are welcome.