暗微幽光

It is upgrade Time!

Today the leading programmer of DMDX, Jonathan Forster, announced the debut of DMDX 4.0.0.0. Here is the forward message:

“So with all the recent Unicode changes and the just completed changes to the way DMDX handles other applications stealing the focus I decided we really were due for a major number revision even if it didn’t represent a wholesale revision in the code base it certainly represents wholesale changes to the way DMDX operates. So DMDX 4.0.0.0 is up on the website. Among the changes are macros working in Unicode, a small revision to the PIO code that allows it to work in limited privilege environments (without registry privilege hacks anyway) and the new SoldierOn mode. It’s worth noting DMDX 4 still used the values TimeDX 3 writes to the registry. The SoldierOn mode is active with either the command line -soldieron switch or DMDX’s EZ mode and basically allows DMDX to resume operation after another application steals the focus:

-soldieron
Prior to version 4.0.0.0 of DMDX if another application popped up a window or DMDX otherwise somehow lost it’s focus (sticky keys anyone?) it would basically hang up. Control of the machine was possible to get back with Alt-TAB and you could kill off DMDX with the task manager but that run of DMDX was toast. Onus was always on the experimenter to make sure an experimental machine was free of such software, after all if DMDX just recovered from such situations data integrity was sure to suffer, not to mention display integrity (it is possible to have display elements from previous items remain on the screen). Given the advent of remote internet testing it behooves us to make DMDX behave a little better so now the dreaded DDERR_SURFACELOST is caught and the job is terminated gracefully unless SoldierOn mode is activated with -soldieron in which case all display surfaces will be set to the default background color and DMDX will resume execution flagging that an error occurred in the output file (.AZK or .ZIL). Only real issue remaining is Alt-TABbing to the menu window of DMDX where it won’t do anything, one has to Alt-TAB to the first DMDX window (the DX window) and then the job will resume.

/”\
-jonathan (j.c.f.) \ /
X
ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN – AGAINST HTML MAIL / \

The best thing about growing older is that it takes such a long time. ”

We may be entering the era of unicode.