Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2006 23:36:16 -0500
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Does "^G" work on Windows 9x/Me?
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On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 04:17:44AM +0000, Eric Blake wrote:
>> Neither Corinna nor I have a real machine running Windows 98 any more
>> so we can't easily test to see if echoing a CTRL-G to a console window
>> running bash (or any other cygwin shell) actually does anything.  Can
>> anyone confirm if this actually plays a beep?
>
>My experience with Win98 is that both before and after the patch,
>snapshots 20051229 and 20060103 12:55:23, the command
>"printf '\a%1000s\a' 1" produced two tweets on the motherboard
>speaker (which is rather faint to hear since I keep my box underneath
>the desk), rather than playing a .wav file on my speakers which
>are located on my desk.  Yes, my 266MHz box is slow enough that
>printing one thousand characters had enough noticeable I/O delay
>that I could distinguish between the two beeps.  I would much
>rather hear a .wav file, though (or not hear, as the case may be,
>when I mute my desktop speakers - there is no way to mute the
>motherboard speaker).

The patch shouldn't have had an effect on a working installation so I'm
glad that there is not change in the recent snapshot.

Apparently, Windows 9x defaults to the system speaker no matter what.
How very surprising that this would be inconsistent.  What. are. the. odds?

>Maybe Win9x needs to use MessageBeep(0) to play a .wav.

In theory, MessageBeep(-1) will try to play a sound, and if that fails,
revert to the system speaker.  Other sounds are not documentated to work
that way.  Otherwise, I probably would just change Cygwin to use 0 since
this is supposed to play the default sound.  Or, we could even use our
own nifty .wav file.

I don't think that it's acceptable for there to sometimes be *no* sound
since you never know when the sound could disappear and, if you are
relying on an audible beep, it could be pretty annoying not to get one.
That's why I just want this to always work rather than having a
something, like cygcheck, which could be run when you think of it (to
answer Gary's question).

Corinna and I discussed making this more flexible and introducing a
visible alert but I don't want to destabilize 1.5.19 at this point since
we are hopefully close to a release.  I just wanted this to work the
way it was supposed to work.

cgf


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