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Text File | 1993-05-03 | 14.7 KB | 279 lines

SPC 5.8 Integrated equipment utility by Bob Eyer [73230,2620] May 4, 1993 ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ │ Like the idea of a BBS program that works at a basic │ │ level with no configuration at all--a miniature BBS │ │ which can be made as sophisticated as you like, but │ │ which can be run as a simple utility if you forget how │ │ to use it? Try HOSP. Lots of people like it. And you │ │ can have a copy for only $25 (the basic shareware │ │ charge plus $5). That contribution pays for HOSP as │ │ well as some four dozen plus additional utilities, many │ │ of which cover territory nowhere else reviewed. See │ │ SHARE.TXT for details. For preview, try most recent │ │ version of HOST in Library 1 of Compuserve's IBMBBS │ │ Forum. (Search for MINIATURE in Lib 1) │ │ │ └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Syntax ------ SPC [? H A P F E D S] [=identification] [>file/PRN/COMx] Options (any order, any case, any combination) ---------------------------------------------- ? or H or HELP - Brief help screen. Default is no help. A - Use standard ASCII character set, to accommodate Epson compatible printers. Default is to use extended ASCII character set for display. P - Pause printer. Intended to be used ONLY as an enhancement of DOS PRINT. To resume printing, enter PRINT. F - Include drives A: and B: in drive report. No include is the default. E - Exclude UNDEF drives from totals. Default is to include drives flagged as UNDEF in totals. D - Force DUPlicate detection instead of SUBSTed detection in drive report and net duplicates out of the totals. The default is SUBSTed detection, unless a supported network is detected, in which case SPC defaults to DUPlicate detection. The D or S options are used for overriding these defaults. For details see discussion below. S - Force SUBSTed detection instead of DUPlicate detection in drive report and net SUBSTed drives out of the totals. = - Identification string. SPC puts your identification string on the right half of Line 1 of the display, overriding the author credit, if you use '=' followed by your selected identification information. SPC looks for the occurrence of the equals sign on the commandline and interprets everything following it (up to but not including redirection and piping symbols) as an identification string rather than as an option. SPC no longer converts your ID string to upper case. Maximum length is 21 characters. Default is to display author credit. Fuller documentation is available on request, if you are registering SPC specifically. Use of SPC options ------------------ SPC options are provided largely to supply fine-tuning in SPC applications as well as solutions to specialised problems which few users will have. For example, only network operators who are not using the network types which SPC can detect will find it necessary to use the D option. Generally, use of SPC's options will not be needed. To get help on the use of SPC options, just enter SPC H The following is a brief explanation of SPC's display, hitting the main points without going into detail (the detailed explanation is available in the complete docs, obtainable through registration). Let's look at a relatively full display. Situation is we have logged in remotely to our own BBS and have remotely initiated a print job at the host through a shell allowing us a little more than 200k of memory space. We issue the command SPC P =Lan remote so as to document our work remotely (this assumes that SPC is in the DOS path at the host). ┌ Sunday 04-02-1993 18:49:29 ────────────────────────────── SPC 5.8 ┐ │ DOS 5.00 VGA Color 3 MB 1 LPT1: S* PMP ID: Lan remote │ │ FC (01/15/88) ISA - K R 8259 - ----- 80386/29.5 80387/140 │ │ X.....1..........2...........*.........4..!....5............ 294 │ │ Resident: TIMEPARK-512 QUICKEYS-448 QUICKEYS-448 │ │ MARK-1392 DOSEDIT-1968 MARK-1408 PRINT-10768 │ │ - SHARE PC LAN 655360/204144 - EMS 4.0: 1278/885 1 │ │ Port ─ Address Config ────── Uart ── Modem ── DTR ─ RTS ─ Carrier │ │ COM1: 3F8 19200 N 8 1 16550A Ok High High High │ │ COM2: 2F8 2400 N 8 1 8250 - - - - │ │ Drv ── Status ─ Sector ─ Cluster ─── Free ─ Allocated ─ Total ─ Drv │ │ C: BOOT 512 2048 1.501 16.298 17.799 C: │ │ D: 512 2048 10.250 7.549 17.799 D: │ │ E: 512 4096 0.979 6.037 7.016 E: │ │ ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │ │ M: Totals less SUBSTed drives: 12.730 29.884 42.614 M: │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ This is the "snapshot" display advertised, and it is designed to present as much redirectable information as possible in a very small space, so that the user can obtain a quick overview. The display informs us that our host is run under PC LAN on top of DOS 5, the host monitor is VGA color, there are 3 MS mouse buttons active for the Sysop at the other end, 1 printer port now Selected and printing (S*) with PRINT multiplexer currently paused (PMP). We note that the CPU speed is 29.5 and the coprocessor is operating at 140. Removable TSRs installed at the host are TIMEPARK, QUICKEYS (twice), MARK (twice), DOSEDIT, and of course the PRINT multiplexer. Little or no EMS is in use. We are communicating through a 16550A Universal Asychronous Receiver-Transmitter (UART), the modem is Ok and DTR, RTS, and the Carrier are all at logic High. There is another communications port in the host node, but no modem is connected to it. Having noted these facts, we issue the PRINT command from DOS remote to continue the print job, and use SPC to determine when the job is finished (the '*' will disappear when data is no longer flowing to the printer). Throughout SPC's reporting method, the simple '-' or dash is used to represent logic low, feature not present, or zero. The appearance of a symbol means that what it represents has been detected. In general, the display may be classified into a header, and two columnar reports. The header consists of the DOS Line, the Motherboard line, the Speed graph line, the RAM memory map lines, and the Memory line, in consecutive order. The first columnar report is about communications ports, while the second is about disk drives. The DOS Line is in fact a display of a mixture of miscellaneous readouts. From left to right these are: The DOS version number, the type of monitor/adaptor, number of MS-compatible mouse buttons installed, number of printer ports displaying which one active, status of active port (Selected, Disconnected, Out of paper, etc), asterisk indicating whether data is being fed to the printer, whether DOS's PRINT multiplexer is resident, and whether it is paused (see above about the P option). Following these data appear the user-selected report identification (see above about command line usage). The Motherboard line shows, from left to right, the Model Number in hex notation, the date of the BIOS revision, the type of bus (MCA or ISA), External event wait states, Keyboard intercept, Real time clock, Slave 8259 present, and whether DMA channel 3 is used. This group is followed by keyboard info, whether keyboard is Enhanced, Insert mode, Caps lock, Num lock, and Scroll lock. The last group on this line are the processor and coprocessor types, with the speed index for each. The Speed graph line consists mainly of a 60-point logarithmic speed graph for the CPU and NCP speeds. X means '4.77 Mhz 8088 XT' - an index value of about 1.0. '1' refers to the approximate speed of an 80186 machine (about 2.0 on the Norton scale), '2' refers to the speed position of a 6 MHz 80286 AT (about 7.0), '3' the position of a 16 MHz 80386 AT (about 29.0), '4' the position of a 16 MHz 80486 machine (about 94.0), and '5' the estimated speed position of a 16 MHz 80586 machine (about 250.0). The maximum of the scale is a speed reading of 1000.0. '*' denotes the position of your machine on this graph, and '!' indicates the position of your coprocessor, if you have one installed. Speed readings are mostly based on simple arithmetic (and on calling a simple BIOS dummy routine) - for the CPU, integer addition; and for the NCP, double-precision addition (which, if a coprocessor is present, is done exclusively by the coprocessor, not SPC's floating point emulator). The CPU speed index closely follows the Norton scale up to about 10.0, and then linearly increases for faster machines after that. Above AT-level readings, the Norton scale actually tends to level off to a maximum value of about 40 - for which reason, the Norton Index is a very poor measure of calculation efficiency for machines in the 386 or better class. At the end of the Speed graph line appears a readout for current Environment space usage in bytes. The RAM memory map lines show which removable TSR's are in conventional memory and their size, exclusive of environment and data segments associated with each program. For a more detailed report, use Kim Kokkonen's MAPMEM program, or the MEM command in DOS 5. The new RAM memory map is intended primarily as a guide for mark/release procedures and primarily for users of DOS 4 and DOS 5 who wish to avoid typing multiple commands just to get all the information that could be quickly displayed in one screen. For speed, SPC uses the fact that, beginning with DOS 4, the name of a resident program appears in its main PSP, rather than merely in the Environment segment, and so can be retrieved in one pass. In more detailed memory maps designed to fully support DOS 3, multiple passes and lookups are needed to get all the information, and so reduces execution speed. SPC does not provide a memory map for versions lower than DOS 4. The Memory Line shows the status of the following, left to right: DOS Verify status (shows VER if set), whether DOS SHARE is resident, type of Local Area Network installed or type of multitasker in use, the total amount of normal RAM and the amount free in bytes, the total amount of available Extended memory in thousands of bytes, the EMS version number, total EMS memory in thousands, the amount free, and finally, the number of EMS handles in use. The message 'No expanded memory' replaces the latter fields if no EMS is present. The columnar reports are fairly self-explanatory, since each statistic is headed by a title. A few notes should be added. - SPC detects networks and multitasking for specific operational reasons, which have been found to affect displays and accuracy of other data. For example, SPC distinguishes SUBSTed and DUPlicate drive reporting in order to determine how individual drive statistics should be added to form the totals at the bottom of the display. Since network drives are always defined during net configuration as redirected drives, a default display in a network environment used to flag many drives falsely as being SUBSTed, and so refuse to add them into the totals at the bottom. Thus, the purpose of network detection is to enable SPC to determine whether the environment is such that exclusions from the totals should be made by means of a test for duplicate, rather than SUBSTed, drives. SPC supports detection of PC LAN, MS/LANtastic/3Com, and NOVELL netware. SPC interrogates multitasking for a different but also practical reason: Some tests run by SPC would in fact interfere with other tasks in a multitasking environment, were it not for the fact that SPC turns multitasking off just long enough to complete these tests (usually not more than one tick of the computer's clock). This is one of the reasons why it is possible to obtain relatively stable speed readings in multitasking environments. SPC supports detection of Desqview (DV) and DoubleDos (DDOS). - As in the memory line, the drive report uses decimal notation, not mixed decimal/binary. Drive space appears in millions of bytes, not thousands of "K". If a drive has more clusters than 65534, SPC will label it as having 'UNDEF' status. Typically, CDROM drives will fall into this category. To eliminate UNDEF drives from totals, use the U command line option (the default is to include them). Other SPC drive status indicators are BOOT, CSPEC, DUP, and SUBST, each of which should be self-explanatory. - The value of LASTDRIVE in CONFIG.SYS (or DOS's default) is found at the ends of the bottom Totals line. ---------------------- End of documentation