README.1ST for Executor/DOS 1.99d (experimental)

Hi Folks,

This is the fourth experimental release of Executor that supports color.
This release is intended for people who have already purchased 1.2.
There is a demo version of 1.99d available separately from this
distribution.

In order to use this, you must have a fully enabled copy of Executor/DOS
1.2 installed as \executor\executor.  Then you just need to cd into the
directory that contains this file and say "update", and your copy of
Executor will be brought up to the snapshot that was made in the ARDI
labs on December 8.

Your old copy of Executor will be moved to \executor\executor.bak and
your old copy of \executor\executor.exe will be moved to
\executor\go32.bak.  The new version of executor will be built with the
transmogrifier program, and the new copy of executor.exe will be copied
from go32.exe in this directory.

NOTE:  To the best of our knowledge, this experimental version of
Executor is superior in almost every way to any version of Executor that
we have released in the past.  However, the color support still needs
work, so many color applications will either produce the wrong
colors or die horribly.

Please send comments to "bugs@ardi.com".

If you haven't already done so, you may wish to subscribe to the
Executor Interest mailing list.  Just send a message to
"majordomo@nacm.com" with no Subject line and a body that says:

	subscribe executor your_name@yoursite.yourdomain

and the automatic mailing list software will add you to the list.  If
there's something you think the other mailing lists will benefit by,
feel free to send e-mail to "executor@nacm.com".

Changes between Executor/DOS 1.99d and Executor/DOS 1.99b (1.99c
    was not made available to the general public):

	"Palette Editor" works

	More programs believe we have 32-bit color quickdraw

	"ColorJack" works

	NIH Image 1.55 comes up, but doesn't yet work

	In addition, many changes have been made to the non-DOS
		versions of Executor (Linux and NEXTSTEP)

Changes between Executor/DOS 1.99a and Executor/DOS 1.99b:

	Should work properly on 386 based machines

	Word and StuffIt work again

	Timer interrupts occur at 60 times a second instead of 18.2

	Properly identifies itself as 1.99b


Changes between Executor/DOS 1.0 and Executor/DOS 1.99a:

	Mac formatted CD ROMs are accessible if you have the Microsoft
		CD-ROM Extensions loaded.

	Executor will be able to recognize any SCSI Macintosh hard disks
		that can be seen by ASPI drivers.

	By default, Executor will only look for external drives and
		examine your floppy drive once, at startup.  You can
		use Left_Alternate/Shift/2 to tell Executor to check
		again, or you can use "-drivecheck" to have Executor
		look at your drives every time you try to open a file.

	Mkvol will work properly with volume sizes near 65536.

	Executor now drops back to the launching dialog after you
		quit an application.

	The ability to print to a file is partially implemented.  If
		you have a "\TMP" directory, then many programs will
		be able to print PostScript to the file
		"\TMP\EXECOUT.PS"

	Many color programs now work, although many still don't.

	Our synthetic CPU is now over four times faster than the one
		that was originally in 1.0.

	Programs are more likely to die with an error message than with
		a register backtrace.

	You can now allocate up to 8 Mb for your Application Zone.

Several new switches are available on the command line.  Here are all
the switches that you can use with 1.99b:

    Switch      Min     Max     Default         Default when switch
						is present, but with no
						value specified

    macbpp      1       8       4               8
    realbpp     1       8       4               8
    refresh     0       60      0               10
    shadow      0       1       0               1

    nosplash    0       1       0               1
    debug       0       10      0               10

    noclock     0       1       0               1
    noint8      0       1       0               1

    drivecheck  0       1       0               1

    nomouse     0       1       0               1

    applzone    128     8192    1024            2048
    syszone     128     4096    512             1024
    stack       64      4096    256             128


    nativecode  0       1       1               1

There are possibly additional constraints on some of the switches.
Please note VGA supports four bits per pixel (16 colors), and it
requires SuperVGA to support eight bits per pixel (256 colors).  As
such, the default is for Executor to run in four bits per pixel mode,
even though this mode is considerably slower than eight bpp. 

Typically, if you have 12 Mb or more memory and a VESA compliant Super VGA
card, you'll want to invoke Executor with theses switches to run a color
program:

	executor -macbpp -realbpp -applzone 4096 -stack

and to run a black and white program, you'll use:

	executor -macbpp 1 -realbpp 1 -applzone 4096 -stack

Eventually we will get rid of your need to use these switches, by making
Executor able to dynamically adjust all of the things that the switches
control.

Work on our file browser continues, but we will be releasing the file
browser separately from 1.3 and 2.0.  It will be available free of
charge via the network and should be on the 2.0 installation disks, but
it will be available to everyone, even people with just the DEMO version
of Executor.

Feel free to redistribute the .zip file that contains this readme file
and the transmogrification stuff, but be aware that it can only be used
by people who have already purchased Executor/DOS 1.2.

Thanks for all the help you've provided us in the past.  We're looking
forward to new bug reports, suggestions and personal experiences.

Cliff Matthews
Founder,
ARDI

Correspondence should be sent to questions@ardi.com or bugs@ardi.com.

These days I answer almost no e-mail directed to me; it is just rerouted
to someone else.  I am not trying to be a snob, I'm just trying to keep
development at full speed.
