DOORWAY BETA A bug where using a /V:D and logging in locally or registering Doorway would crash some systems has been fixed. If you are using a fossil you can use COMXF (where X is the port number) or SYSF to force DOORWAY to use the fossil. If you have a non-standard port, then you can put the port number after the SYS, ie. DOORWAY SYS:03E8:5 would use com3's uart with an irq of 5. if you try to use SYS and /S:* it will now give an error message and ignore the /S:*. A new switch as been added. The /RB switch will reboot the computer on carrier loss, etc, instead of breaking the program. This is better for some systems, such as some on DV which will simple close then reopen the window. However for many a soft reboot must be used instead of a hard reboot so the /19 switch may need to be used as well. Read the information on the /19 switch, as it will often crash DOS if something like DV is not loaded. The /T: (trap switch's operation has been changed). If you trap an alpha character, it will now trap both upper and lower cases of the alpha (before it always only trapped the upper case). Also you can put multiple characters on the /T: line, ie. /T:Ax^C^K would trap a,A,x,X,^C and ^K. If the switch ends with a ^, then the ^ will be trapped. 10-15-92 DOORWAY is much better at starting at the top of the screen if you change pages than before. In fact you may not see any more updates that start half way down the screen anymore. Fixed a problem where DOORWAY did not detect some fossil drivers. Doorway was putting the com port number into DL, and the fossil driver was looking at dl and dh (dx). DOORWAY is now smarter about scrolling. Many times DOORWAY would scroll when there was no apparent reason for it. This should happen less often now. If a program needed to load command.com for whatever reason and you had a /h: in the command line, the program would often not load and run properly. DOORWAY is smarter now about looking at what command.com is being asked to do, so that the program should now load, but the /h is still functional to elimiate shells to dos. 10-21-92 Digiboard support. If you are using DOORWAY with a DIGIBOARD then use COMXD or SYSD to indicate it is to use DIGIBOARD calls (The X is the com port number). 10-22-92 Added a /J switch to control scrolling. Some people were previously using a no scroll version of DOORWAY. That can be accomplished now with a /J:25 or higher now. This switch sets a threshold of how many lines must match when a scroll is done to allow a scroll instead of rewriting the whole screen. Default is 5. Previous versions of DOORWAY were at 1. 11-3-92 Sensing, of DWCOMM changed. Methods are put in the public domain. If DWCOMM or printer redirection support is not sensed then printer redirection will not work. Now other com programs can tell DOORWAY what they can and cannot do, such as special character support and printer redirection. Special character support simply means that if a character needs to be displayed on the screen which would normally be interpreted as a control character, such as a line feed, carriage return, or form feed, then it will be preceeded by a NULL to indicate it is to be displayed and not interpreted. Printer redirection is accomplished by DOORWAY sending the following string for the printer: ESC[#;NNNPSTRING. The # is 0-2 to indicate which LPT (1-3) is being written to, the NNN is 1 to 255 which gives the length of the string to go to the printer, and the STRING is the string to go to the printer. Old method (still works): Doorway asks for cursor position. If one comes back it assumes ANSI is supported. If the position is returned as 0;0R then DWCOMM is assumed on the other end and special character overrides and printer redirection are allowed. New Method: Doorway sends a get cursor address. If one comes back it assumes ANSI supported. If a 0;0R comes back then special character override and printer redirection support is assumed as above. If a true cursor position comes back then DOORWAY will send a ESC[c, which asks the remote what it can support. If the remote returns a ESC[?128;1;2.....c then DOORWAY will determine what is supported. The 128 says that it has DOORWAY support, the ;1 says that special character overrides are supported, and the ;2 says that it supports printer redirection. Later ;3, ;4 etc. will be used for other supported functions, such as graphics capability. DOORWAY announces it's entrance and exit to the calling end. An ESC[=255h indicates that DOORWAY mode should be turned on, and ESC[=255l indicates that it needs to be turned off. 11-25-92 Fixed Digiboard (COM1D, COM2D etc.) where it would not do printer redirection previously. Fixed DOORWAY where it works with IRQ's over 7. 11-28-92 Fixed DOORWAY where it will now work with many programs which were using INT 9 to trigger reading the keyboard buffer. Several of these are Quicken, Quick Basic Compiler when you are in a window, and EDIT which comes with DOS 5. Previously DOORWAY was unable to get the program to read the keyboard buffer until someone entered a character on the HOST system. 11-29-92 DOORWAY now supports 16550 UARTS. If it detects a 16550 it will indicate so on the opening screen (to sysop only), and enable the buffers. Bug found (and fixed) where menu mode would sometimes crash a system if using Digiboard. 12-04-92 DOORWAY is now Desqview aware. It is more selective about which interrupts to restore under Desqview, as restoring some interrupts could cause a crash if running under Desqview. 12-08-92 Lockup problems under Desqview on carrier loss (thought they were already fixed), fixed again! 12-10-92 When Doorway exited it would dump the characters in the UART if it was a 16550. It now waits until the UART is empty before resetting the UART to previous buffer mode. This prevented the other end from going out of no wrap mode when exiting. 12-11-92 A /NT switch has been added. This forces DOORWAY to not always start at the top of screen. If a program is doing a lot of updating on an upper line it could prevent the screen from updating completely further down. For instance a clock could cause DOORWAY to spend all it's time updating the top line, and never updating below line 13. 12-14-92 Some systems with Desqview were STILL locking up on carrier loss. Fixed AGAIN! 12-16-92 OK, found that if you run DOORWY in two windows at once under Desqview, Desqview would lock up. This turns out it was caused by the code added to make DOS Edit, Quick Basic editor, Quicken and other programs which refused to read the keyboard unless there was a hardware keyboard interrupt. Hooking and faking a keyboard interrupt on more than one partition would lock up Desqview. I have found a way around it, so this version should not be a problem under Desqview, and should work with those programs as well. 12-17-92 Have improved "tracking" on the remote end when in Direct Screen Write mode. This version will no longer allow the host to "go off and leave" the remote when doing a directory, even though you are in direct screen write mode. It will no longer leave gaps when doing a directory, so it is not necessary to switch back to BIOS mode when in dos for proper remote display. The /NT switch should no longer be required. It has been left in for the time being but if I don't hear that it is still needed will probably remove it shortly. 12-20-92 Fixed problem where DOORWAY would do an external abort on some high ascii characters when in, or after haveing been in Direct Screen mode. This also may fix some other random lockup problems. 12-31-92 I am determined to have all problems resolved by the end of the year. Here's hoping. Fixed problem intorduced by code to make Dos Edit and such work, where entries in the menu (such as password) would lock up the system if entered from the HOST keyboard. 1-2-93 Problems with DOORWAY not terminating a DOS session properly are addressed. 1-11-93 Problem with Doorway overwriting line 17 in BIOS mode is fixed. Added a new capability. The addition of an "M" to the com or sys statement will allow DOORWAY to provide a menu for doors, but will do NO redirection, keyboard, or time monitoring. 1-12-93 Fixed lockup when using the "M" function added yesterday if logged in in local mode. 1-13-92 Fixed problem where some programs, such as DOS edit were locking up. 1-19-93 Found that function $40 was not being trapped on a /d disable writes. 1-20-93 Adding the M function stopped fossil from working. Fixed. 1-25-93 Found a problem where high intensity was being interpreted as blink on some programs, fixed. 2-5-93 Added some more characters for translation if DWCOMM in not detected, such as lf, cr, tab, and control S. 2-9-93 Added additional delay when DOORWAY inquires about remote capabilities. Some modems "hold" information for a while before sending it out the mode, and this was causing some systems to give up on a response before they should have. This made DOORWAY not identify DWCOMM in some cases. 2-12-93 Fixed problem where high intensity background could cause remote to blink if in direct screen write mode. 2-17-93 If Doorway was using a non-standard port, DSZ would think DOORWAY was initially not redirecting. This would result in DSZ turning off redirection, but not turn it back on if DOORWAY used the PORT:XXXX:I statement. DOORWAY has been modified to return a 7F instead of a FF when the redirection call is made, to indicate a non-standard com port. Since DWXFER uses this information, it now looks for 7F instead of FF, and must be updated at the same time as DOORWAY if you are using them with a non-standard port. DSZ should now work properly with DOORWAY on non-standard ports. 2-18-93 Added a /NCD switch. This reduces the normal 4-6 second wait for carrier loss to be acknowledged to 0-50 mSec. This is for some direct connections where the CD/DTR is dropped for only a second or so to terminate. Fixed a problem where the /I: menu would not display if the /D, disable writes to disk was set. Also programs which would try to write to the console would not work with that switch set. DOORWAY now determines if the write is to the console, aux or PRN before trapping them with the /D:. 3-1-93 Finally found why DOORWAY would occasionally lock up under Desqview on a carrier loss, or timeout. DV will occasionally corrupt the BP if an int 10 is done from within an interrupt. This has now been fixed. 3-5-93 Found a problem where some programs would report printer not ready when doing redirection under DOORWAY. Now fixed. Found that if DOORWAY was unable to recover after 255 seconds, it was not rebooting on carrier loss. Fixed. Found that on carrier loss, DOORWAY could hang the system when using Digiboard & Fossil. Fixed. 3-15-93 A dos shell will now force the environment to be the same size as the master environment. This should eliminate out of environment problems when in a DOORWAY drop to dos. 3-25-93 Some programs do not react very favorably to being externally aborted. If there is a sequence of 16 or less keystrokes to exit the program, DOORWAY can be made to send this sequence upon carrier loss. If after this sequence is sent, the program is still not aborted, DOORWAY will revert back to externally aborting the program. The exit sequence is defined by a /*: switch. Thus a /*:EXIT^M will stuff the keyboard with "EXIT[RETURN]". Control characters are preceeded by a ^. A control sequence counts as only one character. Extended keyboard keys can also be used, in this case use a @X, where the X is the scan code of the key. For instance a "F3 Y [RETURN]" sequence would be "/*:@=Y^M". The ":" may be left out if desired. The @= can be found by running givescan.exe and entering the F3 key. 4-8-92 Added tracking of locked regions of files, so DOORWAY will unlock all file regions during an external abort. Found a problem if programs used enhanced calls for the keyboard, in some cases the enhanced part (bit) was being lost by DOORWAY prior to calling the keyboard routine. Eliminated all CTRL BREAK checking. If a program did not capture the CRTL BREAK under DOORWAY and one was entered, Pascal's break routine could take over, aborting the process improperly, leading to lock-ups. 4-10-93 Left debugging code in from previous version. Could crash systems using ram at B000. 5-18-93 Made DOORWAY capable of reading a configuration file. USE DOORWAY COMX DOORWAY.CFG or DOORWAY SYS DOORWAY,CFG format to use the configuration file. The configuration file uses the same switches as the DOORWAY command line. Each switch is on a seperate line, and they can be in any order. For the termination codes (*: switch), the F2 and F4 keys required a @< and @> entry on the command line. DOS would interpret these as redirtion symbols, and cause DOORWAY to not work. These symbols can be placed in a configuration file without any problem now. The DOS 127 character limit is no longer a problem. Have written a configuration file editor. The editor name is DWCONFIG, and it is menu driven, with context sensitive help available by entering F1. 5-19-93 If a terminal program needed to return the VT220 codes with the ^[[c identify command, DOORWAY would not detect the doorway support later in the string. IE. ^[[128;1c meant printer redirection was supported. ^[[6c meant that VT100 was supported. ^[[6;128;1c should mean both are supported, but previously DOORWAY would miss the 128 if it was not the first code. 5-20-93 En entry for exitline (/Z:) would cause an internal error 104. Fixed. 5-22-93 DOORWAY has grown from requiring 65k to 74k. Made a change which decreased requirements by 3k. Will attempt further reductions on future revisions. 5-24-93 If printer redirection was selected, DWCONFIG was reading it as DUMP. Fixed. When DWCONFIG exited, video was left with yellow on blue. Fixed. 5-27-93 DOORWAY was ignoring all switches after the /P (program switch) in the config. file (it was passing it all to the program). Fixed. Added a number of additional codes for special character overrides for compatibility with RIPTERM, and other com programs. 6-2-93 Reduction of stack size on 5-22 resulted in occasional stack overflow problems on carrier loss. Increased stack size by 500 bytes. 6-8-93 Added a /FC (force carrier detect) switch for use with null modem cables. 6-9-93 Found problem where DOORWAY would lock up on lost carrier if more than one file was locked. Fixed. Aborts should also happen quicker now. 6-24-93 Will attempt sending the termination sequence 3 times with 10 second delays between the attempts before externally aborting program on carrier loss/user timeout. 6-30-93 If the /K:V switch is set will reset the keyboard time on printer output redirection also now. If the configuration file is used, DOORWAY would not pass parameters to the program. Fixed 7-13-93 Fixed a problem where DOORWAY would not successfully load a program which is being passed a parameter with a "." in it. 7-20-93 Fixed a problem where a program may be unable to read the termination sequence on carrier loss if it occurs during a screen update, and the program checks the keyboard while writing the screen. 7-31-93 Added the ability for DOORWAY to parse environment variables from the config file. Thus a /s:\%drive%\%path% will substitute the variables in the environment, just as it would on the command line. DWCOMM If you use DWCOMM b or DWCOMM B on the command line DWCOMM will use the BIOS or Fossil calls instead of it's internal handler. Note that if you use BIOS on high speed connections, BIOS may not be able to keep up, since it is not interrupt driven, and has no buffering. 10-22-92 Disabled CRTL-BREAKS in DWCOMM. 10-23-92 The recompilation of 10-22-92 caused a bug in the dialing where it would show a lot of garbage characters. Fixed. 10-27-92 Fixed a problem where if you exited a directory after a shell, DWCOMM did not log back into the original directory. Also carrier would be dropped when exiting a DOS shell with some modems. This should be fixed now, but since the modems we were using did not drop carrier I need to know if the problem still exists. 11-7-92 Added 16550 detection, and buffering. Previous versions could lose characters with slow computers or under multitaskers at high baud rates. Max baud is now about 8 times higher than it was. Also added CTS/RTS flow control to eliminate overruns at high baud rates and with slow printers. 12-10-92 If line wrap is off, DWCOMM would display instead of performing a carriage return or line feed if it occured in column 79. Also it would backspace instead of displaying when it suppose to if in column 79. 12-11-92 Reverse video would blink. Fixed. 12-15-92 Some DOORS send an ESC[0K instead of an ESC[K for clear to end of line. This is not defined, but DOORWAY now will ignore the 0 if this code is received and clear to the end of the line. 1-12-93 Added scroll window capability. Galatacom sends this VT100 code, and it was not implemented previously since it was not a true ANSI code. 1-13-93 Made so that the switches can be in any order. Added switch "A", (ie. DWCOMM A), to make DWCOMM send ANSI codes for the cursor keys, home and end keys. It will detect when Doorway is active and switch to Doorway mode automatically, and revert back to ANSI mode when it exits DOORWAY (or other application which sends the DOORWAY mode on and off sequences). Without the "A" it will remain in DOORWAY mode as always. 1-31-93 Just got informed the carrier drop problem supposedly fixed 0n 10-27-92 was still not fixed. Still works on all our modems, so unable to test. However, I think I have it fixed this time. 2-19-93 If you use the "a" switch to make DWCOMM send the ANSI instead of the DOORWAY codes for Major BBS, then it will also ignore the NULL lead-in. This is necessary as Major precedes some ansi codes with a NULL, making the ansi sequense display instead of being interpreted. In this mode, DWCOMM is unable to display special characters such as CR, LF, FF and backspace. However, if you drop into DOORWAY, that will be detected, and it will go to DOORWAY mode, re-enabling all that is lost with this switch. Major BBS sometimes sends a zero for cursor position for position 1. DWCOMM now will substitute a 1 for 0, if there is a 0 for cursor position. 3-8-93 If you use a "C" parameter (DWCOMM C), then DWCOMM will exit upon carrier loss. 3-29-93 Fixed 115,200 bps. 7-9-93 Found a bug in the Pascal compiler was making the F11 and F12 keys non- operative. Now fixed. DWXFER 11-12-92 Added 16550 support. Improved sync on bringing up and exiting. You must upgrade both ends, or you may find that they do not sync properly. XTABLE 12-08-92 Entering the same character twice suppose to delete the entry and restore it to the default with proper scan code. However it was putting in a scan code of 0 for each entry, now fixed. DWHOST UPDATE Advanced Features in v3.0 -------------------------- This section describes some additional features in DW Host. o Extended Comm Port Specification - DW Host now allows you to use comm ports other than COM1 and COM2. If you specify a comm port greater than 2 on the setup screen (F3), you are prompted for the port address and interrupt (IRQ) number. This technical detail is required due to the lack of standardization on COM3 and COM4. o No Password Option - Some people are using DW Host to front-end applications which provide their own security. When used with these applications, the DW Host password entry requirement becomes redundant. If you are using DW Host v3.0 and delete the password entry on the setup screen, then as soon as a connect is established, DW Host exits (or invokes the application named on the setup screen). The caller sees no password entry prompt when no password is configured in the setup screen. o Modem Activity Display - As an aid in setup trouble-shooting, all strings sent to the modem AND all modem responses are displayed on the status screen adjacent to the new label of "Modem:". As new characters are sent or received from the modem while it is in command state, they are inserted into the display at the right, shifting earlier data to the left in order to keep the same length display. o F1 or F2 to Quit in Modem Reset Error loop - You may now quit out of of DW Host by hitting F1 or F2 when the system is re-cycling due to a modem reset error (earlier versions required hitting the big red switch). DW Host v3.0 Page 8 Advanced Features in v3.0 (Cont'd) ---------------------------------- o Enhancements to DW Host v3.0 include: completely reworked modem control logic for more reliable operations. Occurrences of modem reset errors are far less frequent (and compatibility with more modems is provided) in this release. Comm ports now may be opened at speeds to 38,400 bps. The ability to dial out to make a connection using the new P parm has been added (See "Operating DW Host", Page 6).