Date: Mon, 1 Mar 93 13:42:12 +0100
From: Steve Linton <sal@dcs.st-and.ac.uk>
To: Multiple recipients of list <gap-forum@samson.math.rwth-aachen.de>
Subject: Re: porting GAP to OS/2 2.0 with emx

Harald Boegeholz writes:
>
> I have just acquired GAP and have no experience with it. Even before
> trying it at all I thought it might be nice to have it working on my
> PC under OS/2 2.0.
>
> Has anybody ported GAP to OS/2 2.0?

Not as far as I know.

>
> Let me tell you what I did so far:
[...]
How do the emx produced DOS executables behave? What expanded
memory/swapping protocols will they use? How fast are they? Apart
from the kbhit() problem identified a few weeks ago, the DJGPP
executables seem to work pretty well in a variety of environments.

Sinc I just joined the GAP-forum, I don't know about "the
kbhit()-problem". Could you tell me what that was?

As for the DOS performance of emx: I haven't made any speed
measurements yet, but I can do that sometime. emx does not support
DPMI, but does support VCPI or XMS. It can also coexist with VDISK.SYS
3.3 and later. emx uses all available memory, whether conventional,
extended or expanded memory. But it does not use extended AND expanded
memory at the same time. emx will swap to disk if there isn't enough
real memory.

On the whole I think that it is comparable to DJGPP/GO32, with the
additional benefit that it produces executables that work under OS/2
2.0 as well. I cannot imagine why it should be slower, but I will try
that soon.
>
> Some work remains to be done, I admit. At least the command line
> editing should be changed so that the cursor keys can be used. Before
> spending any time on this I'd like some feedback: Has anybody already
> done this?

Again, not as far as I know. The DJGPP port (sysdos.c or whatever
it`s called now) uses various arrow keys and so on, but I doubnt
that you could use the same code.
If nobody else is doing it, I will look into that as my spare time
allows.

mfg
hwb
--
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