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From: agollum@engr.uky.edu (David Herron aka Admiral Gollum)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: AST Sprint Spooler slowness
Message-ID: <1797@ukecc.engr.uky.edu>
Date: Wed, 18-Nov-87 19:26:02 EST
Article-I.D.: ukecc.1797
Posted: Wed Nov 18 19:26:02 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Nov-87 15:05:22 EST
References: <634@parcvax.Xerox.COM>
Reply-To: agollum@engr.uky.edu (David Herron aka Admiral Gollum)
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Organization: Univ. of KY Engineering Computing Center
Lines: 23

I use a PD program called MSPOOL.  It is specifically written *not* to
slow the system down.  It only prints when (a) the 'print-a-character'
bios routine is called, or (b) the system is in the console wait-for-
a-character loop (actually it preempts this loop).  99% of the time
it runs the printer at full speed, though it stops or slows during
intensive disk accesses or calculations (like when EMPIRE is generating
a new map :-).  Most commercial programs evidently check the keyboard
at least once in a while no matter what it's doing so in practice this is
no problem.

The program can handle printing to a serial printer and has a command to
disable the spooling or flush the buffer.  Unfortunately it can only use
up to 63k of main memory and doesn't work with extended or expanded memory.

I can mail this sucker to you, or if interest is high enough, post it
(this is not my program and I have no source; should I send it to comp.binaries
or post it directly?).

PS if anyone has a PD/shareware spooler which uses LIM memory or spools to
disk (which I could direct to my ramdisk) let me know.  I have 1.5 megs
here and the only thing I can use it on is a ramdisk...

Kenneth Herron