From: sandmann AT clio DOT rice DOT edu (Charles Sandmann)
Message-Id: <10010240352.AA14440@clio.rice.edu>
Subject: Announce: PMODE/DJ 1.3 beta
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 22:52:45 -0500 (CDT)
In-Reply-To: <4331-Sat21Oct2000003828+0300-eliz@is.elta.co.il> from "Eli Zaretskii" at Oct 21, 2000 12:38:30 AM
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I'd like to announce the beta of an updated version of PMODE - which is
an alternate DPMI provider for DJGPP.  It comes in two forms - a stub
which can be appended to a DJGPP COFF image for a single image distribution,
and in a "one pass" TSR which can be used in place of CWSDPMI.EXE.  PMODE
is smaller and faster than CWSDPMI, but does not provide virtual memory
or ring 3 protection to programs.

The binary distribution is available from:
 ftp://clio.rice.edu/djgpp/pmode13b_BETA.zip
The source distribution is also available in the same directory:
 ftp://clio.rice.edu/djgpp/pmode13s_BETA.zip

Since PMODE is a specialty DPMI provider with fewer users, I plan for the 
beta to last around 4 weeks - until November 17.  At that point I will 
update the code based on comments and release 1.3.

There are several bug fixes in this release, and it has been enhanced to
support more than 64Mb of memory in both RAW and XMS environments.  In
particular, if you have a very large memory footprint machine (>512Mb)
and a single image to run, PMODE is the most efficient way to provide
DPMI services for that image.  

Changes from 1.2 to 1.3:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- fixed bug which zeroed memory when running under another DPMI provider.
  This caused PMODE/DJ programs running under CWSDPMI to trash it's code.
- upgraded the stub loader code to 2.02 functionality and made it consistent
  (as much as possible) with the stub loader code used by CWSDSTUB.
- fixed several bugs in the stub with missing segment overrides, causing
  variables to be stored in the wrong places.
- added support for more than 64Mb of raw memory using extended BIOS functions.
  If more than 64Mb is available the int 15 hook won't return the proper values.
- added support for more than 64Mb of XMS memory using extended XMS functions.