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Experimental BBS Explossion 3
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WHATSNEW.DOC
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1993-11-06
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WHAT'S NEW IN VERSION 2.31
o NOTE: I'm releasing this update to version 2.30 because of an
improvement to CHIPSET and because of a problem I encountered
with DOS 6.2. Both are rather significant, and so I didn't
want to delay getting something out.
o IMPORTANT: If you experience trouble with HIGHDRVR.SYS
"hanging" after installing and initializing a device driver,
add the undocumented /STUB option, as in:
DEVICE=HIGHDRVR.SYS /STUB C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS
I have noticed this problem with the new "STEPUP" DOS 6.2
upgrade, but the /STUB option seems to correct the problem.
I hope to get this corrected in the next version so that you
will not need to use the /STUB option.
o CHIPSET.EXE: Core logic chipsets are designed to work
with only a few types of CPU chips. Chipset now uses this
fact to drastically reduce the number of possible chipsets in
its test.
o LASTBYTE.SYS: If both a monochrome and a color monitor
were attached, the "progressing dots" displayed
during initialization would go to the wrong (inactive)
monitor. Corrected.
WHAT WAS NEW IN VERSION 2.30
o Added support in LASTBYTE.SYS and CHIPSET.EXE for:
Acer Laboratories Inc (ALI) M1217, M1219, M1419.
Atmel AT40495, AT40498.
Biostar Systems (BIOTEQ) 82C3480.
Chips & Technologies 84031.
HINT CS8001, CS8005.
Macronix MX83C305.
Micro Integration Corp. MIC9283, MIC9382, MIC9391, MIC9498.
OPTi 82C295, 82C495SLC, 82C463, 82C597, 82C801, and 82C802.
SiS 85C461.
Texas Instruments TACT83442.
VLSI Technologies VL82C480, VL82C481.
o HIGHDUBL.SYS: A new device driver that moves DBLSPACE.BIN
into High-DOS memory even without using HIGHUMM.SYS and
DOS=UMB.
o LASTBYTE.SYS, CHIPSET.EXE, CHIPSET.DOC: Changed the part
number designator for the Chips and Technologies 4021 to
84021 to be more consistent with the 84031.
WHAT WAS NEW IN VERSION 2.30
o LASTBYTE.SYS: Corrected bugs in the low-level physical
drivers for:
ACC Electronics ACC2121.
Atmel AT40498.
ETEQ ET82C391, ET82C491, ET82C4901, ET82C390SX, ET6000,
ET9000, ET9800, and ET391SX chipsets.
Oak Technology OTI-021, OTI-041.
OPTi 82C291, 82C498, 82C499, 82C682, 82C683.
SiS 85C360, 85C401, 85C411, 85C460 chipsets.
o HIGHUMM.SYS, HIGHDISK.SYS, HIGHEMS3.SYS, HIGHEMS4.SYS, and
HIGHKEY.EXE: If the /NOSPLIT option is not used, these
utilities now try to put the major portion of their code into
the HMA as first choice, or into Bank-Switch memory as second
choice.
o HIGHKEY.EXE: Added an optional "HMA" subparameter to the
/BUFSIZE command line option, as in /BUFSIZE=1000,HMA. The
HMA subparameter tells HIGHKEY to try to allocate its recall
buffer within in the HMA.
o HIGHSPLR.EXE: Added an optional "HMA" subparameter to the
KBYTES command line option, as in KBYTES=10,HMA. The HMA
subparameter tells HIGHKEY to use free HMA space first when
allocating its recall buffer.
o LASTBYTE.SYS: Corrected a bug that on some PC's would
erroneously report "Free 30-day evaluation period has
expired"
o LASTBYTE.SYS: On some slow machines, especially old 8088
PC's, the cpu was spending all of its energy to paint the
dots on the screen and didn't have time left over (between
timer ticks) to get through the initialization code. This
has been corrected by writing directly to the display buffer
rather than using the video bios INT 10h.
o CHIPSET.EXE: Corrected a bug that caused the EFAR 82EC495 to
be incorrectly reported as a 82EC491.
o LASTBYTE.SYS, CHIPSET.EXE, CHIPSET.DOC: All SiS chipset
drivers now allow full use of the 64k shadow ram segment at
F000.
o HIGHTSR.EXE: Corrected bug in command line parsing that would
remove "100" from the command line "HIGHTSR TEST 100 /a".
o HIGHTSR.EXE: Corrected bug in code for /SIZE option that
would cause "Memory Control Blocks Damaged" error message
and/or report incorrect size requirements.
WHAT WAS NEW IN VERSION 2.30
o HIGHTSR.EXE: If TSR did not stay resident, HIGHTSR would
write the name of the TSR over part of the interrupt vector
table. Corrected.
o LASTBYTE.SYS: Modified so that if initialization fails to
complete with dots going back and forth indefinitely, a
timeout will occur causing LASTBYTE.SYS to issue an error
message indicating the name of the internal routine where it
got stuck and the trace of functions that were called to get
it there.
o LASTBYTE.SYS: Modified to disable and invalidate the internal
cache of a Cyrix CPU chip (if present) during a reboot. This
eliminated some cache coherency problems during the process
when a Cyrix chip had been used to upgrade a motherboard
whose bios was designed for a 386 with no cache.
o HIGHMEM.EXE: Some memory control blocks in low memory were
not being identified properly under DOS 6. The problem was
in a routine that identifies the last memory control block
established by DOS, and only did not fail with DOS versions 3
through 5. Since this routine is used in several .EXE and
.SYS utilities, it may account for several problems using
prior versions of TLBMM with DOS 6.
o HIGHMEM.EXE: Corrected a bug that would sometimes cause most
or all blocks of memory to be incorrectly labelled as "Bfr
Workspace".
o HIGHMEM.EXE: If a TSR allocated a block of data in Hi-Dos
memory, it would be labelled "Unknown [DAT]", rather than
replacing the word "unknown" with the name of the allocating
program. Corrected.
o HIGHMEM.EXE: Improved the code that determines the "type" of
software installed in a particular block of memory; i.e.,
[PGM], [TSR], [ENV], etc.
o HIGHMEM.EXE: Minor cleanup to labelling of Main Bios.
o CHIPSET.EXE: Modified so that now it will refuse to run if
default drive is not a floppy disk. (Protects against
accidental damage to files on a hard disk.)
o LASTBYTE.SYS: Improved the determination of whether or not
the cache (if installed) needs to be flushed when accessing
Bank-Switch memory.
o LASTBYTE.SYS: Relaxed the restrictions on DOS=XXXX:NN
options.
WHAT WAS NEW IN VERSION 2.30
PROBLEM: Many main bios roms are split, and users want to use
DOS=F000:XX to recover the initialization region at the base
of the main bios. The DOS option required controllable
shadow ram in the main bios region to allow this. This
invoked an error message for those users who configured their
unused shadow ram to the R/W state and used PHYSICAL=FIXED
because the latter was originally expected to be used with
systems that had NO controllable shadow ram at all.
SOLUTION: The DOS option now only checks that the specified
region is within the controllable shadow ram IF AND ONLY IF
controllable shadow ram exists. Otherwise, no restrictions
are applied.
o LASTBYTE.SYS: Corrected a bug in the initialization code that
is executed immediately upon loading LASTBYTE.SYS into
memory. No direct cause/effect relationship, but could
possibly explain a few things! Argh!
o LASTBYTE.DOC: Eliminated the section that describes the
"TEXT" option of LASTBYTE.SYS; this option was removed from
the code some time ago but never got removed from the
documentation. Oops!
o LASTBYTE.SYS: Replaced "Hardware malfunction! Initialization
stuck" failure message with less pejorative "Can't
Initialize! Contact Key Software Products".
o LASTBYTE.SYS: Using the @<filespec> option with an invalid
filespec would trigger an inappropriate error message stating
that no physical option had been specified. Corrected.
o CHIPSET.DOC: Reorganized the document so that it's easier to
compare the characteristics of various chipsets.
o HIGHHOLE.EXE: Corrected a bug that prevented including the
character generator tables from including the EGA 8x14 font.
o HIGHMARK.EXE, HIGHUNDO.EXE: Corrected a bug that would cause
HIGHUNDO to report "Attempt to free non-existant MCB!" and
corrupt the memory control block chain in upper memory.
o INSTALL.EXE: Now handles /L: option of DEVICEHIGH and
LOADHIGH properly.
o INSTALL.EXE: The Name option of an old registered
LASTBYTE.SYS installation was not being copied into the
upgraded installation. Fixed.
o INSTALL.EXE: The option to create a demo disk did not append
WHAT WAS NEW IN VERSION 2.30
the (required) suboptions to the PHYSICAL option of
LASTBYTE.SYS. Corrected.
o INSTALL.EXE: Options such as /MONO, /COLOR, and /INSERT were
being incorrectly appended as suboptions to the PHYSICAL
option of LASTBYTE.SYS. Corrected.
o HIGHKEY.EXE: Reduced the resident memory requirements.