Actually, well written TSR (terminate stay resident) programs
do not prevent other TSRs from loading and executing. It simply a
matter of finding and moving the pointer for the existing routine
to point at your routine. Instead of returning control to the user
program, you call the routine you replaced. Any number of TSR
programs can squeeze into this chain, memory size permitting.
Unfortunately, many user programs would "steal" the pointer
for its own routine, thus breaking the chain and preventing all
previously resident routines chained to that pointer from executing.
Lotus 123 comes to mind, at least the version I used. Hot keys and
buffers were disabled once Lotus 123 loaded.
Tom Turak
----------
From: Dave Gillett
Sent:Friday, June 11, 1999 2:34 PM
On 11 Jun 99, at 12:06, Brent Reynolds wrote:
> .... In there, you will find about a dozen or more keyboard buffer
> utilities, often known as "buffer stuffers," or buffer extenders. They
> generally run as TSR utilities, and some of them allow the possibility for
> stuffing hundreds of keystrokes into the keyboard buffer, whereas DOS
> generally allows no more than 15 keystrokes at a time in the buffer.
Probably nobody really cares that it's the BIOS, and not DOS, that provides
15 (or 16) keystrokes worth of buffer. Just a nit.
But you should perhaps be aware that anything that extends this size needs
to find somewhere else in memory to do it -- which breaks anything that "knows
about" the BIOS's behaviour. So you almost certainly cannot run more than
one of these utilities at a time (okay, that's probably not a serious
problem); you may also find that they conflict with some other TSRs that use
"hot keys" or otherwise interact with the keyboard interrupts, and any
utilities that work by inserting "faked" keystrokes into the buffer.
[i.e. There's no general solution that can be guaranteed to work for
everyone. Any of these utilities might or might not work with the other
software you use.]
David G
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