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Almathera Ten Pack 3: CDPD 3
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Almathera Ten on Ten - Disc 3: CDPD3.iso
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026-050
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scopedisk43
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screenx22
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screenx.doc
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Text File
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1995-03-18
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193 lines
ScreenX Documentation - By Steve Tibbett.
ScreenX is a program designed to be put into your Startup-Sequence. It
provides a number of things that are already available in different
packages, along with a couple of its own twists.
NOTE: INFO NEW TO V2.2 IS AT THE END OF THIS DOCUMENT.
Clearly Written Documentation?? Come on, it's a PD program!!
ScreenX's major functions are:
1: Provide a small clock/memory counter on the Workbench Screen,
which will take very little processor time, yet be accurate.
2: Provide a means to recover those screens that are "Lost" behind
those stupid programs that don't bother to put Depth gadgets
on their screens. i.e., Chessmaster.
3: Provide an easy way to save a screen to an IFF file (Easier than
"Flip the screen you want to the front within 10 seconds" anyway).
4: Give me something to do for a couple of evenings.
5: Be small enough to be put into your Startup-Sequence and not take
much memory.
ScreenX accomplishes all of these quite well.
ScreenX has two modes of operation: When it is "Awake", and when it is
"Sleeping". When it is sleeping, it is sitting on the WorkBench screen
showing you how much Chip and Fast RAM you have, and the current time. If
you click in the ScreenX window (thus activating it - You cannot tell if the
window is active or not because of the text that's being printed on the
title bar. Just click in it and you will know it's active). When its
window is active, you can either tap the [SPACE] Bar or the right mouse-
button to "wake up" ScreenX.
When ScreenX is awake, it opens up its own screen (taking about 25K of
memory doing so, which is why I made the small window in the first place).
On the left of this screen is a list of all the screens that are currently
in the system, and on the right of the screen are seven gadgets allowing you
to tell the program what to do.
These gadgets are:
Pop Screen To Front: This gadget will take the currently selected
screen and pop it to the front. Handy for getting
"hidden" screens back.
Push Screen To Back: If you have 4 screens in memory, and one of them
doesn't have a Depth gadget, you can push that
one to the back, and as long as you don't click any
of the other screens back behind it, you won't
have any problems (if you do click anything else
behind it, you'll have to use ScreenX to get them
back!).
Update Screen List: This will redraw the list of screens that is
being shown. Necessary if any of the screens
listed leave while you are looking at them, or if
new screens appear. Note that any action taken on
a screen that is no longer around is ignored (even
clicking on it).
Cycle All Screens: I'll let you figure this one out on your own. Note
that to make it stop, you must click anywhere in the
main ScreenX screen...
Close Screen: Danger. You got it. This isn't something you should be
doing unless you KNOW what you are doing. It will let
you CLOSE DOWN the screen of your choice. The problem
with this is that if anybody else decides to write on that
screen at any time, BOOMO. What it's really useful for is
when a program crashes, you can close its screen to free
up a bunch of Chip RAM that is tied up. Just make sure
you don't go closing the WorkBench down, or something
stupid like that. OK?
Save Screen to IFF File: This gadget will instantly turn the screen red
(So you know something's going on), and save the screen
selected to the filename in the Text gadget at the bottom
of the screen. Note that the filename in that gadget must
include the full pathname, or else if you just type a
filename in there, it will be written to the current
directory.
Oh yeah... there are a couple of command line options for this thing too.
COMMAND LINE OPTIONS:
There are a couple of options you might want.
-C : This will DISABLE changing color 0 to White and color 1 to Black for
printing purposes. Without this option, when you tell it to print a
screen, color 0 and color 1 become white and black, which makes the
printout usually look better (depending on what you are printing).
If you are printing digitized pictures, or anything else where the
colors actually matter, then you NEED this option.
-E : ScreenX will eat up about 5% of the processor's time keeping the memory
display accurate. If you don't like this, you can put "-E" on the
command line, which will tell it to only update the display about
once every second and a half - this way, it's really taking NO
time.
-F : This option will display the free memory as BYTES rather than
as K. It makes the window a little bigger, but some people
like seeing 200000 rather than 200.
...Steve Tibbett
2710 Saratoga Pl. #1108
Gloucester, Ontario
K1T 1Z2
(or just call my BBS at 613-731-3419).
(or send me BIX mail at 'S.Tibbett')
(or Plink mail at "STEVEX")
Actually, if you want the source for it, send me a disk with some sort of a
return mailer thing (maybe even throw in some cash, eh?), and I'll send it
to ya.
/*****************************************************************/
NEW INFO FOR V2.1 OF SCREENX:
I don't think anybody ever actually wanted ScreenX to come up with the big
window open, so I took that option out altogether. When you say "Run
ScreenX", it just opens the small window.
Put ScreenX in your startup sequence!
(This has changed - see the V2.2 notes)
I added the ability to print screens. Click on the screen you want printed,
and then click on "Print Screen" and it will start doing it. If you click
on the Print Screen gadget while the screen is being printed, it will
usually STOP the print (unlike most programs that tell you to click stop,
but really they just ignore you).
A little warning here about printing screens: Just after I added the Print
Screen gadget, while I was testing it, I ran into a weird problem - I could
print, say, the DiskX screen, but if I tried to print the ScreenX screen, or
the Workbench screen, I'd get a blank page. Well, after THREE HOURS of
working on this (starting at 11 PM...), I finally figured out that if your
preferences are set for Black and White, and your screen colors are sorta
not far enuf apart to be Black and White, it will print all white - White's
an easy color to print... see the command line options above.
Another new gadget: Screen Info. What this does, is tell you my BBS
number! There are also some less useful stats there, like the current
font that screen is using, the amount of memory that screen is using
(Note: If it says 32K, it really means 32000 bytes), the number of
Windows open on that screen, and the number of Gadgets on that screen.
The depth of that screen too - Depth = Number Bitplanes (it's always
fun to run a bunch of programs, and then try to find all the gadgets).
Ummmm, that's about it for now, I guess. If anybody can think of some
more stats to stick in the "Screen Info" window, let me know - I sure
can't.
/******************************************************************/
V2.2 NOTES:
This version has only three enhancements.
First, if you click in the title-bar-window, and tap [F], it will change its
display to "Largest:" and show you the Largest fragment of memory left in
that section (if your largest memory fragment is too small, it's like you
don't have any memory left).
Secondly, if you put "-F" on the command line, instead of showing you the
number of K you have free, it will show you the number of BYTES free.
Lastly, you NO LONGER NEED RunBack to put this in the Startup-Sequence! Just
put "SCREENX" on a line by itself. No RUN needed either! If you want
ScreenX to come up when you boot, just copy ScreenX V2.2 into the "C"
directory (or onto the root directory) of your boot disk. Then, anywhere in
your startup-sequence (before the ENDCLI of course), just put "ScreenX".