MAIN SCREEN A close box has been provided. If clicked, and no file or disk buffers are in use, you will be returned to the desktop. If anything IS in memory, you will be asked to confirm or cancel. The same is achieved by pressing Alternate/Q. SHIFT/F10 is the "emergency escape". If running Supermon normally, it will ignore anything in memory and quit. If, however, you have entered Supermon because of a system crash (a bomb), Supermon will return to the desktop preserving all possible information such as crash point, register values, stack pointers etc. This is provided as an "out" if after entering Supermon you have lost control, such as no menu drop downs, no slider bar etc. This can happen, as Supermon, on intercepting a crash will try and maintain the system as much as possible the way it is, for greater fault finding capabilities. ALTERNATE KEY COMBINATIONS. Supermon has always allowed the Ascii, Hex and Disassemble displays to be called with CONTROL key combinations, but now allows quite a few of the more often used functions to be called with ALTERNATE/- key presses as well. Mostly these are the first letter of the function, for easy remembering. These are shown beside the entry in the drop down menu, except: Alt/5 toggles to 50 Herz screen mode (colour only) Alt/6 " " 60 " " " " " Alt/I inverts the screen display NEW FEATURE: When doing a "Search" of memory (Debugger drop down menu or the Alt/F (for Find) option), a repeat is now available. It was a real pain, when trying to find multiple occurrences, to have to drop down the menu again, click on Search, get the entry box, click on O.K etc. Now, pressing RETURN will redisplay the box, pressing RETURN again will search again. This can be repeated as often as wanted. PRESSING ANY OTHER KEY OR SELECTING ANY OTHER FUNCTION WILL CANCEL THIS SEQUENCE. When in the disassembler display, the arrow keys may now be used to scroll up and down a line at a time, exactly like the slider bar arrows do. The clock display is in 12 hour mode (by popular request). If entering a new time, this must still be in 24 hour mode. FUNCTION INTERRUPTS. The following functions may now be aborted by pressing the Alternate and Left Shift keys together: FORMATTING BAD SECTOR MARKING DISK SEARCH TRACE FILE DIRECTORY INFORMATION VERIFYING MEMORY BLOCKS PRINTING OUT FROM SUPERMON As you can see, all functions which might take a long time (or "get lost" like Directory info if links are wrong). NOTE: If aborting formatting, the drive light may stay on. Don't worry, the motor is OFF. SCREEN SAVER In the Accessory editor, there is now an option to set the screen saver time. This may be from 1 to 99 minutes. If no key is pressed, and no mouse movement detected for the set time, the screen will go into "attract" mode. In monochrome, this simply inverts the screen every few seconds. In colour, the colours will be rotated, producing some pretty, and some sickening, screen displays. This very effectively prevents screen "burn in". The advantages of this type of screen saver are: 1) No extra memory required. There are "pretty" ones, with fire works etc. but these require 32K of memory to be set aside, and let's face it, the screen saver is only on if you're not there, normally. 2) Does not simply turn the screen off, which may cause damage to your monitor, or cause you to flick the switch thinking the thing was not on. (believe me, I've done it!) MOUSE ACCELERATOR Another item in the editor, as well as available through the "mouse trap" function both in Supermon and from the accessory. NORMAL is just that. FAST is twice the normal speed and SUPER is 4 times normal. HOWEVER, Supermons accelerator is just that touch better than anyone elses (of course). This function can be set in any resolution, but it assumes movements in the x and y direction are for mono screens. When running in MEDIUM resolu- tion, Supermon changes back a gear in the vertical movement, and when in LOW res., in BOTH hor. and vertical. In other words, Fast becomes normal and Super becomes Fast. This is so that regardless of resolution, the same mouse travel will produce the same screen travel, both horizontally and vertically. If you normally work in low res, but wish faster mouse travel, set it for Super. This will actually produce double speed in both horizontal and vertical movements. Supermon will accelerate the mouse ONLY if you move MORE then 1 pixel per time interval. This interval is set on power up, but may be altered by programs). This allows for slow and accurate work to stay that way, and makes it pseudo proportional. HARD DISK GUARDIAN Another pre-set option. Whenever the hard disk is not accessed for 15 seconds, the head will be moved over the "landing zone". This is a track set aside for parking, which contains no data at all. THE DISK IS NOT PARKED OR "SHIPPED", simply put over that position. If the power is switched off (or fails), it is now automatically parked. If the disk is bumped, it is as safe as possible. As the landing zone is usually close to the beginning of the disk, near the directory, no time is wasted on the next disk access, in fact there is an overall (very small) time gain. PARTITION INFORMATION AND PARKING When in Supermon, call the 'Read sector' function, and simply enter root or ROOT. Regardless of the drive actually selected, Supermon will now read the so called root sector, containing the partition information for the entire hard disk, which is NOT sector zero. If you type PARK or park instead, the hard drive will be parked, and for most, will have to be switched off then on again before further access. This saves having to return to the desktop and running a parking program. VIRUS CHECK 1 Still remains the checking of the boot sector on power up. VIRUS CHECK 2 This little feature (available only as a preset option) will monitor the disk access vectors at regular intervals. Should it detect a change in these vectors, (other than Supermon originated) it will invert the screen and rapidly ring the bell for several seconds. This means "hey you, check it out". It will then REMOVE itself, having fulfilled its task. If you were, for example, opening a non Supermon ramdisk at the time (why would you?), you can simply continue, as this is a legitimate use of the vectors. If not, BEWARE!!!! Find out what may be messing around with disk access, as it may be something quite nasty. VIRUS CHECK 3 This may be called from the Accessory or from under the Odds 'n ends menu. It will prompt you to insert a disk in drive A. The virus checker will ALWAYS default to drive A, as will innoculating the disk. It will check this disk for bootsector status, and report one of 8 possible conditions. 1) Disk is innoculated 2) Legitimate boot sector 3) Could be IBM format 4) Disk is safe, but not innoculated 5) ACTIVE bootsector, but seems safe 6) NON-ACTIVE, but seems suspect 7) ACTIVE boot sector, seems highly suspect 8) VIRUS FOUND!!!!! The first 3 possibilities can be left alone, and numbers 4 and 6 may be safely immunised. Numbers 5 and 7 could easily be legitimate bootsectors, and if destroyed, could make the disk unusable. HOWEVER, I would recommend that you check these out (see the manual). Number 8 offers the option to keep the virus intact for study, or to destroy it. If Supermon displays number 8, don't send it to me, as it is obviously already catalogued. However, should Supermon report a suspect disk, and IT DOES TURN OUT to be a virus, please send it to me! VIRUS CHECK 4 When booting with a disk formatted or quick wiped with Supermon, you will see the message "This disk is 'Supermon' safe" displayed on the screen. This is your guarantee that no virus has taken over this disk. Other virus killers may report this as not innoculated, BUT IT IS! SYMBOLIC DEBUGGER A symbolic debugger option has now been added. For full details of this, refer to the section in the file "CHANGES" relating to pages 39-42. EXTENDED FUNCTIONS This is an option in the accessory, and is automatically called if the accessory is selected from within Supermon. It gives the following options: DRIVE: When selected, time display (if on) is switched off and any future disk accesses will be displayed instead as: Drive:| Read/Write| start sector| number of sectors Particularly handy when trying to fix a "bad" disk MOUSE X/Y: Will display the mouse hot spot X and Y position on the screen. Very useful in drawing programs etc. NONE: Cancels whatever option was previously on, and, if it was on, will redisplay the time. Note: selecting Time Display either from accessory or Supermon Options menu will automatically cancel these options and start the time display. DRIVE B STEP RATE This may be set in the editor, simply by clicking on it. On powering up, the stepping time for drive B will be extended to 6 Milliseconds. This is for slower drives and works in all TOS versions correctly. MARK BAD SECTORS A new option under Odds 'n Ends. This will read the entire disk and mark off any unreadable sectors in the FATs (File allocation table). This means that GemDOS will ignore these sectors, allowing you to use the rest of the disk normally. THIS FUNCTION ONLY APPLIES TO DRIVE "A". Even if drive B is the currently active drive, bad sector marking will occur automatically in drive A only! BUT......... when formatting drive B, IF any bad sectors are present, these WILL be marked off. Please note that in the version of TOS 1.4 release date 22-2-89 TOS does not do this correctly!!! TOS 1.0 and 1.2 do not have this at all. When formatting with Supermon, if one or more bad sectors are detected, Supermon will automatically finish by going through the bad sector marking routine, so you do not have to call this seperately at formatting time. VOLUME LABELS Please check in the CHANGES document under formatter for details on this. That about sums up the totally new features, in the file marked CHANGES will be additional information which I suggest you read/print, as some of the changes to existing options are rather drastic. Will Visser