Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!deccrl!bloom-beacon!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!athena.mit.edu!pshuang From: pshuang@athena.mit.edu (Ping-Shun Huang) Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Subject: Re: Wanted: TSR to "kill" program and return to DOS Message-ID: Date: 31 May 91 02:27:35 GMT References: <46285@super.ORG> Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system) Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 46 In-Reply-To: grantham@super.ORG's message of 25 May 91 20:46:38 GMT In article <46285@super.ORG> grantham@super.ORG (Jon Grantham) writes: But it would be nice to be able to run a TSR that has some hot-key or something that lets me get out of the game without using the "hot-key" "ctrl-alt-delete". Is there a program like that out there? Or is this just fundamentally incompatible with the nature of DOS? To answer the theoretical part of your question, there are indeed TSR programs which permit you to break out of many of old types of games which have no "EXIT-TO-DOS" option. They also work wonderfully for buggy programs which lock up. They don't work for *ALL* cases; because of limitations of DOS, if the foreground application takes control of the keyboard interrupt and the timer interrupt and does other non-standard, nasty things to seize the hardware completely, it is impossible for the TSR to ever get control (example: Windows 3.0 would be almost impossible to terminate using a TSR loaded in advance). However, if the program isn't being that fascist, the TSR can sneak between it and DOS and convince DOS that the program had asked to be terminated. Usually if you have to resort to doing such a thing to a real application, you should finish up anything pending and then reboot the machine, because the TSR did lie to DOS and that could have left some internal DOS bookkeeping undone (i.e. from experience I know that breaking-out tends to stop CED from working). However, breaking out of a game should not cause any problems. Note in OS/2 and some 386-multitasking executives, because they use the hardware virtual machine capability of the i386+ chips to seal off your application almost completely from the hardware, mediating all hardware requests, such programs as you're asking about generally aren't necessary because the executive is always available to close your application by brute force. Now the practical side of your question: I automatically load such a program myself in my AUTOEXEC.BAT because of the number of software packages I use automatically increases the possibility that some combination of them will interfere with each other and lock up the computer. However, I can not be sure of the name of the particular little program I use (my DOS machine is a good twenty-minute walk away). I think PC Magazine may have written something like that, so checking their utilities collection would be worth a shot. I also know a package called Powerkit II (which offers many other keyboard and screen controls) can terminate the running application upon request. -- Singing off, UNIX:/etc/ping instantiated (Ping Huang).