lost bell, can I get it back?

[Brian Chapman]

In article <625 at holston.UUCP> barton at holston.UUCP (Barton A. Fisk) writes:

< This is a minor annoyance:
< 
< Whenever I switch between mulitscreens in SCO at the
< same moment the bell is to sound, I loose the bell forever
< on all screens!

This problem exists in the 2.2 and previous versions of
SCO Xenix.  SCO Xenix 2.3 and SCO UNIX 3.2 do not have
this problem.  Also on 286's the bug actually only causes
a loss of the bell for a few hours.

	---- Bug anatomy ----

On screen switches the video driver turned off the bell and
set the count of "remaining ^G's" to 0.  The remaining timeout()
for the end of the current "beep" was still outstanding.  It
would come in and decrement the "remaining ^G's"" counter to -1.

Now as long as that counter is non-zero the driver assumes
the bell is ringing already and won't start the speaker sounding.

The bell tone is 1/5 of a second in duration (unless you
change it).  On a 286 in (2^16)/5 = 13,107 second = ~3.6 hours
the bell functionality will return.

On a 386 the word size make it take a bit longer.	:-)
-- 
Brian Chapman		uunet!sco!chapman
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!