[Coco] Re: DeskMate 3 & Multi-Vue

[Willard Goosey]

>From: Leon Howell <puritan_2076 at yahoo.com>
>Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2006 15:34:44 +0000 (UTC)

>I was thinking of doing that anyway. Funny, I thought the vdg screen meant 
>256X192. 

VDG screens can also be the CoCo 3 hi-rez screens, as used by
Deskmate, Koronis Rift, Rescue on Fractalus, Carmen, etc. 

>From what I understand, the difference is that VDG windows are always
mapped into the program's address space, so you can directly twiddle
graphics memory, as opposed to windint/grfint where the window is only
in grfdrv's memory space and you HAVE to talk to grfdrv to change the
screen.

>This will still run Multi-Vue, right?

Not on /term.  Also include windint and the w1-w15 descriptors and run
Multi-vue on one of them.  MV has to run on a windint window.
>
>There's a section in the env.file that says:
>
>*PROGRAM=SHELL
>*PARAM=/TERM

 ^comment marker.
>
>This isn't documented in the manual, but I assume it makes it start
>up with the shell as a second program. 

Nope, sorry.  env.file is an add-on hack rather than an integral part
of the OS.  Anyway, those two lines are commented out.

I assume that someone just got overly ambitious with the basic design
of env.file... OS's that have in-memory environment variables tend to
maintain variables like that.

>Since the shell is available from the desktop now, I was hoping I
>could replace "SHELL" with "DESK" and automaticly start up in both
>Multi-Vue and DeskMate.

To do that, put them in /dd/startup .  Or if you want them to start
together, but not automatically at startup, build a seperate shell
script to start them.

>Unfortunately there's a bug in GShell 1.26 so it doesn't read the env.file 
>automaticly...:(

About the only thing gshell uses env.file for is the printer setup.  A
program called control is responsible for reading env.file and setting
up the screen, mouse, colors, etc from it.

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
"I've never been to Contempt!  Isn't that somewhere in New Mexico?"
   --- Yacko