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- WHAT'S NEW IN VERSION 1.13
- --------------------------
-
- - LICENSE.EXE has been modified:
-
- *** BE SURE TO KEEP AN ORIGINAL COPY OF LASTBYTE.SYS! ***
-
- LICENSE.EXE now ONLY works from an original (unlicensed) version of
- LASTBYTE.SYS. In addition, LICENSE now examines your hardware
- configuration and computes a corresponding "signature" that is
- inserted into LASTBYTE.SYS along with your name and access key.
- During CONFIG.SYS processing, LASTBYTE recomputes this signature
- and compares it to the one inserted by LICENSE.
-
- *** LASTBYTE WILL NOT INSTALL IF THESE SIGNATURES DIFFER! ***
-
- Thus LICENSE must be run on the *SAME* machine that uses LASTBYTE.
- If you change your hardware configuration, you must run the LICENSE
- program again (with an original unlicensed version of
- LASTBYTE.SYS), so that the new hardware signature will be computed
- and inserted into LASTBYTE.SYS.
-
- - Documentation (LASTBYTE.DOC) prepared with a text formatter.
-
- - Added image of actual command line to error messages.
-
- - Repaired a bug with HIGHDISK that sometimes clobbered itself during
- initialization.
-
- - Repaired a bug with HIGHBFRS that corrupted the DOS buffers when it
- was run with no command line arguments.
-
- - Added a "BUFFERS=MAXIMUM" command line option to HIGHGBFRS to
- allocate the maximum number of DOS buffers according to the amount
- of available unrestricted High DOS memory. This implements a
- maximum of 99 buffers to be consistent with normal DOS
- restrictions.
-
- - Each of the LASTBYTE device drivers and TSR's now check the status
- of the shift keys. If the left shift, alt, and ctrl keys are
- pressed simultaneously, the software is aborted. This is useful
- when an unfortunate configuration option causes your computer to
- "hang" during a boot sequence. The shift keys were selected to be
- compatible with the convention used by HyperWare's HyperDisk.
-
- - HIGHMEM now display status of EGA/VGA graphics display buffer
- memory - i.e., whether or not it is in use for graphics or used as
- an extension to conventional (low) dos memory.
-
- - A "/Page" option has been added to HIGHMEM to force the output to
- pause after each screen full of data. This option may be
- abbreviated as simply "/P".
-
- - LASTBYTE is now (almost) compatible with Digital Research's MS/DOS
- replacement, DR DOS version 5.0. Exceptions are HIGHAPND and
- HIGHMEM; later releases of LASTBYTE will make every attempt to
- eliminate these incompatibilities.
-
- - Added an "EXTRA" option to HIGHUMM.SYS when the extra overhead of
- the Bank-Switch API functions is needed. Without it, HIGHUMM.SYS
- occupies much less high memory.
-
- - Added API functions to HIGHUMM that allow assigning a name to a UMB
- or BSW block, and to locate a block by its name. (Requires use of
- the HIGHUMM "EXTRA" command line option.)
-
- - Added "APPEND" option to LASTBYTE.SYS command line; used to specify
- how much of a block of free memory that starts at A000 should be
- used to stretch DOS memory beyond 640k. Note that the memory is
- NOT added to DOS until you enable it with HIGHAPND.EXE or
- HIGHAPND.SYS (which replace the old HIGHGFX.SYS and HIGHGFX.EXE).
- Introduction of the APPEND option also eliminates the 2k used by
- LASTBYTE, so that you can now have a full 736k of DOS low
- (conventional) memory.
-
- - Repaired a problem that occured when the CMOS configuration (of an
- AMI BIOS) was set for a type 47 (user defined) hard disk. This
- usually manifested itself as a divide by zero error that occured
- when SMARTDRV.SYS was loaded high with HIGHDRVR.SYS. The regular
- power-on boot sequence (that occurs before LASTBYTE is loaded) not
- only copies the ROMs into Shadow Ram, but then modifies the Shadow
- Ram copy of the BIOS hard disk drive parameter table to insert the
- user-defined parameters of the type 47 drive retrieved from the
- CMOS Ram. LASTBYTE then copied the BIOS ROM into Shadow Ram a
- second time, effectively overwriting these updated locations.
- LASTBYTE no longer automatically copies ROMs into Shadow Ram, but
- rather uses whatever ROM Shadowing was originally in effect before
- LASTBYTE is loaded.
-
- - Cleaned up the error reporting in LASTBYTE.SYS.
-
- --------------------- END OF FILE WHATSNEW.113 ---------------------
-