CG>  NA> since OS/2 traps and virtualises the keyboard (seems to prevent
CG>  NA> problems with apps that change the keyboard rate or LED status). In
CG>  NA> DOS, I had no problems Peeking, just poking. Microsoft's way of 
saying
CG>  NA> "We don't like you poking around in low memory!" :)
CG> 
CG> Howdy Nick,
CG> 
CG> I get around a little {grin}.  This is my most favorite echo of all.
CG> 
CG> When dealing with I/O ports, PEEK is sometimes used to set the port mode.
Hows that accomplished? I thought PEEK was just used to read a port status.
On a more interesting note, is it possible to POKE to the COM ports? I have 
John Zortman's QB Fossil driver, but just wondering out of sheer morbid 
curiousity if it can be done...? :)
CG>  NA> I've played around with ON TIMER to make a QB app give up a 
imeslice
CG>  NA> under OS/2, but it doesn't seem to affect anything, other than delay
CG>  NA> OS/2's switching from full screen to window. Any ideas on giving
CG>  NA> timeslices?
CG> 
CG> I think OS/2 and DeskView can spot when a program is just waiting for a 
key
CG> and give more time to other applications.  Don't think Windows knows how. 
 
CG> sure if a loop that's watching the timer for an exit time will do 
similar. 
CG> TIMER rattles a lot of things and may show too much CPU activity to give 
up
CG> slices.
I'm thinking something along the lines of using ON TIMER to call an interrupt
(14h), to force my QB apps to give up a timeslice. But again we're getting 
into "no-no" territory by Microsoft...
CG> It's not awkward to incorporate timing things inside your standard key 
wait
CG> loop to call SUB's at specific intervals or have the SUB's keep track of 
wh
CG> they need to do things to replace ON TIMER.  You can keep lists sorted 
and 
CG> other tasks in the background, a piece at a time, while waiting for the
CG> operator to make the next selection.
If you use ON TIMER, I think it doesn't matter what your subs are doing, 
ince
the master program loop will always trap the timer and call my timeslice
routines.
CG>  NA> It could be worse, just imagine all the Windows problems I could do
CG>  NA> with that!
CG> 
CG> I can write page after page on why I feel Win95 is one of the biggest 
consu
CG> frauds since computers were first invented {grin}.  I'm hoping both OS/2 
an
CG> Linux will hit the street running with some heavy new stuff soon.
Well, IBM, as always, shoots itself in the foot by completely ignoring OS/2's 
potential and supporting the Microsoft crowd instead. Its nice to see that 
they've done remarkable work with version 4. I'm still running version 3, and 
see no reason to upgrade to 4.0, except for the pretty little "X" button. ;)
I believe that OS/2 does not need Windows support. If a user wants to run
Windows apps, they'll just partition their hard drive with Win95 and OS/2 on
the same drive, and do a dual-boot. Including Windows support in OS/2 is
a drain on system resources, and I'm happy with OS/2's DOS support. Matter of
fact, thats all I run here, is text-based DOS apps. The multi-tasking and 
PFS
features of OS/2 sold me when I was first introduced to it. But thats a whole
other story (and echo) altogether. ;)
TTYL!
Nick.
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