Here's some delay code I picked up some time back. 
I've got lots of code snippets on disk, the trouble is wading through
them to find them.


Area: alt.lang.basic 
  Msg#: 1734                                         Date: 04-02-95  22:45
  From: Glen Blankenship                             Read: Yes    Replied: No 
    To: All                                          Mark:                     
  Subj: Re: QB-sleeping less then

> In plain Quick Basic it is possible to pause the program with the SLEEP
> command. But I need to wait for approx. half a second.
> FOR.. NEXT wait loops are useless ofcourse, due to processor speeds..


SUB Delay (NumTicks%) 
    FOR i% = 1 to NumTicks%
        CurrentTick! = TIMER 
        DO WHILE CurrentTick! = TIMER
        LOOP 
    NEXT       
END SUB

This will delay for the number of system timer ticks (18.2 per second)
specified.  It's not absolutely precise, since you may enter the loop at
point during a given tick, so the very first tick won't necessarily be
full duration.  Still, for "roughly half-a-second" and suchlike pauses, it
should serve. 

The real disadvantage to the code above is if your code doesn't otherwise 
use floating-point numbers, since using TIMER will yank in the entire
floating-point library.  To avoid that, use:

SUB Delay (NumTicks%) 
    DEF SEG = &H40
    FOR i% = 1 to NumTicks%
        CurrentTick% = PEEK(&H6C) 
        DO WHILE CurrentTick% = PEEK(&H6C)
        LOOP 
    NEXT       
    DEF SEG
END SUB

...instead.  It's functionally identical (it simply peeks at the same BIOS
timer-tick count that TIMER uses), but it doesn't use floating-point 
numbers. 

To produce a (roughly) half-second delay, use:

Delay 9

-!-
Glen Blankenship
obother{at}netcom.com



-- 
Pat - La Grande,OR. 
ppridgen at greencis dot net 
 

... Life would be much simpler, if I only had the source code.
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.43