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TITLE: ALARM 4.0 DESCRIPTION: Resident clock, chime, and alarm program Copyright (c) 1992 by Thomas A. Lundin. All Rights Reserved. RELEASE DATE: 6-12-92 AUTHOR: Thomas A. Lundin 16267 Hudson Avenue Lakeville, MN 55044 PHONE: (612) 588-7571 (8am-5pm Central, weekdays) (612) 431-5805 (nights and weekends) REGISTRATION: $20 per copy ABSTRACT: ALARM provides a memory-resident on-screen clock in the upper or lower right corner. On the hour and half-hour, a short tune is played (the tunes are programmable by you). The program can also store up to 10 alarm times per day which will be indicated by another tune and a flashing reminder message at the bottom of the screen, all of which are programmable. The clock display, chimes, and alarms can be toggled on or off individually. Alarms can be specified for day of the week, daily, or single-time activation. REVISION HISTORY: 4.0 6/12/92 Major revision, split into two programs 3.02 12/5/90 Display a clock 3.0 10/14/90 First release, loads tunes from external file NOTE TO USERS OF ALARM 3.02 AND PRIOR: You won't be able to use your current version of alarm settings or alarm tunes. This version of ALARM differs in the way it handles musical tune files. You will need to edit your existing tune files to make them compatible with version 4.0. Basically, this simply involves removing the first parameter in the tune file (the positional indicator), which is now specified on the command line rather than being imbedded within the file. The format of the ALARM.DAT file has also been changed to allow for more convenient alarm setting. See the appropriate section below for details. Also, the earlier version of ALARM has now been split into two separate programs: ALARM and ALARMSET. Doing this has helped to reduce the memory requirements for the TSR portion of ALARM, and has allowed me to put additional features into the program. ALARM.DOC REV 7/19/92 PAGE 1 ALARM is distributed as shareware. It is not free software. If you continue to use this program beyond a 30-day trial period, you are required to register it. The registration fee for this version is $20 per copy. Upon registration, you will receive the most recent version of the program with an expanded 30-alarm capacity. Make checks payable to Thomas A. Lundin (U.S. funds and drawable at a U.S. bank). Please send your registrations to: Thomas A. Lundin 16267 Hudson Avenue Lakeville, MN 55044 The registration fee for ALARM on network file servers is a $50 flat charge for up to 20 workstations PER SERVER, and a $100 flat charge for unlimited (over 20) workstations PER SERVER. I welcome suggestions and comments regarding ALARM. The suggestions of registered users will always be considered first. Please respect the tenets of shareware and register if you intend to use the program beyond the trial period. It is my policy to not add features to the program on the promise of registration, so if you are not a registered user, please do not ask me to change the program to suit your needs. Program bugs are a different story. I will investigate reported bugs from any user and will attempt to fix those within my control. DISCLAIMER. This program and its associated documentation are provided AS IS, without any express or implied warranty. The program is not warranted as to suitability or fitness for any particular purpose. The author and/or distributor of this program shall not be held liable for any perceived or real damages emanating from the use or misuse of this program. The user of this program understands that operation of this program is undertaken at the user's own risk. ALARM.DOC REV 7/19/92 PAGE 2 OPERATION OF ALARM 4.0. The program is run from the command line. First, the TSR portion of the program must be run. This portion of the program handles all of the timekeeping, display and sound functions. At the DOS prompt, type: alarm This command needs only to be run once. If you attempt to run ALARM more than once, no harm done. The program will ensure that only one copy of itself is in memory. After this is done, all other settings are made by running the ALARMSET program. If the ALARM program hasn't been run first, ALARMSET will not work; it will simply note that ALARM is not loaded. The format of the ALARMSET program is: alarmset [options] The available options to the ALARMSET program are: -x Clock disable-enable -c Chimes on-off -a Alarm on-off -k Clock display on-off -p Clock position top-bottom -e Date display on-off -rN Repeat alarms N times -l List the current alarms -sFILENAME Set alarms from FILENAME (default=ALARM.DAT) -tFILENAME Load top-of-the-hour tunes from FILENAME -hFILENAME Load half-hour tunes from FILENAME -mFILENAME Load alarm tunes from FILENAME -dMM/DD/YY Set the alarm date -vXX Video attribute (hex value XX) -? List the available ALARMSET options Multiple options can be used with ALARMSET as long as each one is separated by a space. EXPLANATION OF ALARMSET OPTIONS. -x Clock disable-enable This option toggles between enabling and disabling the ALARM program. Disabling the program turns off the clock display, alarms and chimes, and bypasses the timer interrupt subroutine. The most common need for this feature is to avoid problems with communication programs; some programs will be unable to communicate properly (especially at 9600 bps) -- even if they're interrupt-driven -- when ALARM is running. -c Chimes on-off This option toggles between allowing the half-hour and hourly chimes to sound or be silent. ALARM.DOC REV 7/19/92 PAGE 3 -a Alarm on-off This option toggles between allowing the programmable alarms to sound or be silent. When the alarms are disabled, the alarm messages are not displayed. -k Clock display on-off This option toggles between displaying the on-screen clock or hiding it. When hidden, the chimes and alarms will still sound unless they too have been specifically disabled. -p Clock position top-bottom This option toggles the clock display between the upper-right corner of the screen and the lower-right corner of the screen. -e Date display on-off This option toggles between displaying the time and date or displaying just the time. When date+time is selected, the date is displayed for approximately one second and the time is displayed for approximately two seconds per cycle. The date display is composed of day of the week, month, and day. -rN Repeat alarms N times By default, the alarm tune is played twice through when an alarm is triggered. This option allows you to specify how many times through you want the alarm tune to play. For instance, "alarmset -r4" will make the alarm tune play through four times. -l List the current alarms This option allows you to see what alarms are currently active. -s Set alarms from ALARM.DAT -sFILENAME Set alarms from FILENAME This option set the alarm times according to the information stored in your alarm file (see the section further down for information about the alarm file). This option has two alternative formats: one specifies a filename and the other does not. When -s is used by itself, alarm settings are loaded from a file named ALARM.DAT. When a filename is given immediately after the -s, alarm settings are loaded from that given filename. For example, "alarmset - smyalarm.txt" will set the alarms stored in the file MYALARM.TXT. -tFILENAME Load top-of-the-hour tunes from FILENAME This option loads the tune that will be played at the top of each hour. (The tune file must be created in a format described later in this document.) For example, "alarmset -ttop.tun" will load the top- of-the-hour chimes from a file named TOP.TUN. The default tune is a single beep -- not very interesting. -hFILENAME Load half-hour tunes from FILENAME This option is the same as the -t option, above, except that it loads the tune that will be played each half-hour. ALARM.DOC REV 7/19/92 PAGE 4 -mFILENAME Load alarm tunes from FILENAME This option is the same as the -t option, above, except that it loads the tune that will be played when an alarm is triggered. -dMM/DD/YY Set the alarm date Normally, ALARMSET loads alarms for the current date only when the - s option is executed. With the -d option, you can force another date's alarms to be loaded in place of the current date. -vXX Video attribute (hex value XX) The default clock display is black characters on a white background (reverse video on monochrome monitors). If you want different colors, you can explicitly set the foreground and background colors with this option. The first hex digit controls the background color and the second digit controls the foreground color. The foreground color digit can range from 0-9, A-F. The background color digit can range from 0-7. For example, "alarmset -v1e" would display bright yellow characters on a blue background. (On monochrome monitors, only a few of the possible hex values can be mapped to video attributes; these are 07, 01, 70, and 00.) The color digits and their displayed colors are: 0 = black 1 = blue 2 = green 3 = cyan 4 = red 5 = magenta 6 = brown (sometimes dark yellow) 7 = light gray (sometimes normal white) 8 = dark gray (sometimes black) 9 = light blue A = light green B = light cyan C = light red D = light magenta E = bright yellow F = bright white FORMAT OF THE ALARM.DAT FILE. ALARM.DAT is an ASCII file which contains the alarm dates, times, and messages that the program will use. Up to 10 alarm times can be programmed for one date (30 alarm times in the registered version), but your ALARM.DAT file can contain alarms for as many dates as you want. Each alarm is entered in the following format: MM/DD/YY HH:MM AM|PM Your message here! Each item in the alarm line must be separated by one or more spaces. The first item in the line is the date the alarm will be loaded. If the alarm date matches the current date when the ALARMSET program is ALARM.DOC REV 7/19/92 PAGE 5 run with the -s option, the alarm line will be set; otherwise the line will be ignored. The date is entered in standard month/day/year notation. The year may be entered in two-digit or four-digit form. You can also set a daily alarm by entering the word DAILY in place of a specific date. When ALARMSET sees the word DAILY in an ALARM.DAT file, it will load the alarm regardless of the date, and the ALARM program will set off the alarm each day at the specified time, even if the program is left running for a number of days. You can also set alarms to recur on any day of the week, such as MONDAYS, TUESDAYS, WEDNESDAYS, THURSDAYS, FRIDAYS, SATURDAYS and SUNDAYS, by typing in the appropriate word in place of a specific date. If the current day matches what you've typed in the ALARM.DAT line, the alarm will be set. The ALARMSET program must be run each day in order to update the day-of-the-week and specific-date alarms; only the DAILY alarm will carry over without intervention. The second item in the alarm line is the time that the alarm will be set off. The time is set in 12-hour hours:minutes notation. The hours do not require a leading zero. The next item is the AM/PM indicator. This item is necessary to distinguish between day and night times. A time of 12:00 AM is midnight, while 12:00 PM is noon. The last item is the message that will be displayed when the alarm is set off. The message can be up to 40 characters long. (See the sample ALARM.DAT file for examples.) Any line in the ALARM.DAT file which begins with a semi-colon (;) is treated as a comment line, and will be ignored. You can use comment lines to annotate your alarms. If you enter an alarm time that is on the hour or half-hour, the alarm tune will not sound, so be sure to set your alarms for something other than :00 or :30 minutes. When an alarm goes off, the alarm message associated with the alarm will be displayed on the last line of your screen, and the alarm tune will play. The message remains on the screen until some other screen activity overwrites it. The ALARMSET -s option will load the alarms from ALARM.DAT (or from a specified file, if you gave one). ALARM.DAT must reside in the current subdirectory, or in a subdirectory that is part of your PATH command. When alarms are set, they are automatically enabled, even if you disabled them previously with the -a option. FORMAT OF THE TUNES FILES. A tune file is an ASCII file which contains the individual musical frequencies which make up an hourly, half-hourly, or alarm chime. Each tune file contains one line defining the tune which can be ALARM.DOC REV 7/19/92 PAGE 6 loaded into any of the hourly, half-hour or alarm chimes. The format of a tune line is: BEEP_SPEED,NOTE1,NOTE2,NOTE3,...,NOTE63,0 All elements are separated from one another by a comma. BEEP_SPEED must be a number from 1 to 18. It determines how long each note is played, in increments of 1/18th of a second. For example, a BEEP_SPEED value of 3 will play each note for about 1/6 of a second. BEEP_SPEED is an absolute timing measure based on the 18.2 ticks per second of the system clock, so chimes and alarms will sound the same regardless of processor speed. I've found that a BEEP_SPEED value of 3 makes for a normal pace, while a value of 2 speeds things up quite a bit, and 4 is best left for funeral dirges. NOTE1 through NOTE63 are the individual notes, entered as frequency values or chromatic scale mnemonics, which compose the tune being played. The musical note mnemonics and their associated numeric frequencies are as follows: C#0 17 A1 55 F3 175 C#5 554 A6 1760 D0 18 A#1 58 F#3 185 D5 587 A#6 1865 D#0 19 B1 62 G3 196 D#5 622 B6 1976 E0 21 C2 65 G#3 208 E5 659 C7 2093 F0 22 C#2 69 A3 220 F5 698 C#7 2217 F#0 23 D2 73 A#3 233 F#5 740 D7 2349 G0 25 D#2 78 B3 247 G5 784 D#7 2489 G#0 26 E2 82 C4 262 G#5 831 E7 2637 A0 28 F2 87 C#4 277 A5 880 F7 2794 A#0 29 F#2 93 D4 294 A#5 932 F#7 2960 B0 31 G2 98 D#4 311 B5 988 G7 3136 C1 33 G#2 104 E4 330 C6 1047 G#7 3322 C#1 35 A2 110 F4 349 C#6 1109 A7 3520 D1 37 A#2 117 F#4 370 D6 1175 A#7 3729 D#1 39 B2 123 G4 392 D#6 1245 B7 3951 E1 41 C3 131 G#4 415 E6 1329 C8 4186 F1 44 C#3 139 A4 440 F6 1397 REST -1 F#1 46 D3 147 A#4 467 F#6 1480 NULL 0 G1 49 D#3 156 B4 494 G6 1568 Two or more consecutive notes of the same frequency will sound like one long note (useful for providing aesthetically-pleasing musical phrasing). The series of notes must be terminated with a 0 value (or mnemonic NULL). To load a tune into memory, use the -tFILENAME option (or -h or -m), where FILENAME is any valid PC path/filename that contains tune information. I've provided a few sample tune files for you to experiment with. Notice how I've subdivided the basic tempo in some of the tunes into halves or thirds to allow for simulated rests, quarter- and half-notes, etc. ALARM.DOC REV 7/19/92 PAGE 7 Any line in the tune file which begins with a semi-colon (;) is treated as a comment line and will be ignored. NOTES If you allow your computer to run past midnight, ALARM will automatically increment the date and update the DOS system date, but it will not update any alarms (except for DAILY alarms, which are automatically reset and enabled). You need to run ALARMSET to load date-specific or day-of-the-week alarms for the new date. ALARM uses approximately 13K of RAM when resident. ALARM and ALARMSET are written in Borland C++ 3.0. ALARM.DOC REV 7/19/92 PAGE 8 REGISTRATION FORM DATE: ________________________ NAME: __________________________________________________________________ COMPANY: _______________________________________________________________ ADDRESS: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ CITY: _______________________________ STATE: _______ ZIP: _____________ PHONE: _____________________________ FAX: ______________________________ FEE SCHEDULE QTY AMOUNT REGISTRATION FOR ALARM 4.0 @ $20 PER COPY ________ x $20 = _________ SITE LICENSE FOR STAND-ALONE UNITS 5 - 10 UNITS @ $15 PER COPY ________ x $15 = _________ 11 - 20 UNITS @ $10 PER COPY ________ x $10 = _________ OVER 20 UNITS @ $5 PER COPY ________ x $ 5 = _________ NETWORK FILE SERVER REGISTRATION <=20 WORKSTATIONS @ $50/FILE SERVER ________ x $50 = _________ >20 WORKSTATIONS @ $100/FILE SERVER ________ x $100= _________ SHIPPING AND HANDLING (INDICATE ANY THAT APPLY) (For single copies only; call for S/H on multiple copies) FIRST CLASS MAIL ___$5.00_ UPS GROUND ____7.50_ OVERNIGHT DELIVERY ___20.00_ C.O.D. ADD ____7.50_ TOTAL ________ _________ Send this form with payment to: Thomas A. Lundin 16267 Hudson Avenue Lakeville, MN 55044 Payment terms are Prepaid or C.O.D. Corporate purchase orders accepted from Fortune 1000 firms only. ALARM.DOC REV 7/19/92 PAGE 9