Dos on the 386i (terminal emulation)

[Paul Evan Matz]

krus at diku.dk (Lars Povlsen) writes:
>X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 214, message 12 of 13
>
>... but when trying to
>run the same applications on a tty with dos -w (dos without windows), the
>dos shell came to a halt, without producing a single char of output....
>			Lars Povlsen,

We encountered a similar problem when trying to run a dos application
talking to a VGA card installed in a AT card slot.  Because the
application uses the separate VGA monitor as its "dos window", you'd think
having a window pop-up on the 386i's display would be unnecessary.  But,
to focus keyboard input using the mouse, it is necessary to have a region
to point to.  It would be nice if it could be just a sunview window
running dos -w, possibly in the background.  [Note that our VGA
application doesn't use the keyboard for input, but instead, uses a serial
port driven by a touch screen sensor, which is sampled even when the dos
window is iconic and off screen].  So we tried dos -w to invoke the
application, and got the message: "can't untrack memory, permission
denied."

According to Sun, dos -w will support dos applications that use only bios
interrupts 10 (VIDEO_IO) and 16 (KEYBOARD_IO) for talking to the keyboard
and display.  If (since) your application uses something else, in addition
to these, the invocation of other interrupts seem to have hidden results.
Unfortunately, such deviant behavior isn't reported in any log file
either, so it's hard to know what's going on.  I think they are
considering to, at least, report having trapped an invalid bios interrupt
when running the dos -w.

I'd also be careful trying to run dos -w from a terminal.  Depending on
which vendor's serial card and driver you are using, the dos support seems
to vary quite a bit.

	Hope this helps.  Misery loves company.

	Paul Matz
	PPG Biomedical Systems
	One Campus Drive
	Pleasantville, NY. 10570
	914-741-4685
	path ppgbms!moe!paul at philabs.philips.com