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- Line monitoring Break Out Box
- Copyright, 1990 by
- Raymond L. Gwinn
- 12469 Cavalier Drive
- Woodbridge, Va. 22192
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- General notes and comments, no real documentation is available.
- If you need a manual, you probably do not need BOB. These notes
- and the information displayed when BOB loads should be sufficient
- information for most developers to use BOB.
-
- 1 - BOB is an acronym for Break Out Box.
-
- 2 - BOB requires X00 version 1.21a or above.
-
- 3 - BOB works best with a VGA controller card. The VGA (and
- BIOS) must be IBM compatible. BOB uses some rarely used VGA
- modes. I suspect many users will find their VGA is not
- compatible enough to run BOB. I have successfully tested BOB
- with IBM, Orchid, Paradise and Ahead VGA controllers. BOB will
- also work on some IBM compatible EGA cards. However, most EGA
- clones are not compatible enough for BOB to work correctly. I
- tried BOB on about 10 EGA clones and none of them worked. Vince
- Perriello's EGA, based on the Tseng chip set, is the only EGA
- clone on which BOB has correctly executed.
-
- 4 - Future versions of BOB may require use of the HLLAPI routines
- supplied with X00.
-
- 5 - Future releases of the HLLAPI routines that are distributed
- with X00, will include function calls to selectively enable and
- disable line monitoring and possibly trapping the data to disk.
-
- 6 - A program like ASC (from PC Magazine) is handy for quickly
- determining the hexadecimal value of the displayed characters.
- ASC is available from the Renex BBS at 703-690-7950. It is
- located in file are 17.
-
- 7 - If a file name is specified for the trace data (eg BOB TRACE)
- then two file handles are used. In some cases, users may have to
- increase their FILES statement in CONFIG.SYS. The trace file is
- opened at load time and is not closed until BOB is un-installed
- or ALT-SHIFT F8 is hit. Once ALT-SHIFT F8 is hit, BOB must be
- un-installed and re-executed to start trapping to disk again. A
- clear screen (ALT-SHIFT-F1) causes a disk write and directory
- update.
-
- A program called ANALYZER, written by Bob Hartman, is included in
- the BOB distribution file. This program will convert the BOB
- disk files into a readable ASCII format. My thanks to Bob
- Hartman for putting this program together. Execute ANALYZER and
- it will display its command line options.
-