[RTTY] slow program for wf1b de HB9AWS

[Ekki Plicht]

On Sunday 02 January 2005 20:20, Jerry Flanders wrote:
> As I recall, WF1B is a DOS program. 

That's correct.

> If you are upgrading to XP from an 
> earlier Operating System, this may be the problem - XP does not have the
> same support for DOS programs that earlier Windows versions had. That is
> why on my radio computers, I continue to use Win98se - it has excellent
> support for DOS mode programs.
>
> This has nothing to do with computer speed.

It does, it is a very well known problem with TurboPascal programs. It has 
nothing to do with which operating system you use, it happens also under W98 
or any other OS.

In their endless wisdom Borland programmers choose to implement a certain 
timing loop in a library by using an integer value. This timing routine is 
called at program start to detect roughly the provessor speed. With Pentium 
processors this value is decremented so fast that the resulting value is 
zero, resulting in a division by zero IIRC.

The known workarounds are:
1.) Modify the library and recompile the affected program. Borland released a 
patched version of the library a long time ago. But this option is usually 
not open to most people, since they dont have the sources and/or no compiler.

2.) Artificially throttle down the processor speed for this program. That is 
what Moslo (and other programs) do.

3.) Use a slower machine.

73,
Ekki, DF4OR