From: ijp@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Palmer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: >A5000 secrets: 3D icons
Date: 7 Apr 92 10:41:28 GMT
Organization: Department of Computing, Imperial College, University of London, UK.

banks_p@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz writes:
>ssurawls@susssys1.reading.ac.uk (Mister E) writes:
>
>> uuuuh, what? What does *FX 162,28,3 do? Must have missed that one...
>
>   Sets solid drags to on in RO3....
>
>    Philip
>
>--
>Philip R. Banks                                                         @@@@@/|
>Syntax: mail <banks_p@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz|banksie@khantazi.welly.gen.nz> @@@@/#|
>                                                                        @@@/##|
>What price the crown of a king on his throne,                           @@/---|
>When you're chained in the dark all alone?  ---A.P.P.                   @/    |

I know this is a silly question but why have Acorn not officially
recognized the new features of RO3, specifically the 3d stuff and this
'solid drags' lark? When I say 'not recognized' I mean in the sence of
not supplying the full 'SetIcons' with RO3, and not giving the 'solid
drags' a configuration name so you could do a '*configure SolidDrag'
or whatever, rather than having to effectively poke the relevant cmos
location.

This leads to other questions, what does the rest of byte 28 in the
cmos ram hold? (ie. what might you be resetting when doing a *fx
162,28,3) and why does solid drags take 2 bits of this byte (ie. bits
0 and 1)?

A an aside, I notice that the A5000 that 'Acorn User' use for their
screen shots uses the full SetIcons, and they've made further changes
to make it even more 3d (esp. the standard icons on the icon bar).

That reminds me, don't ask why it reminds me 'cos I don't know, of
something I was going to post. There's a sort of bug in RO3 (probably
also in RO2) (I use the term 'sort of bug' as it might not be a bug,
but I can't think of a good reason that Acorn would have put it in,
and it could (can't think of a situation as yet) actually be useful,
so perhaps feature might be a better term). If, on the desktop, you
have a window, or whatever, come up that limits the mouse pointers
movement somewhat (like error boxes, but this won't work with them for
reasons that will become apparent, if you want to try it on something
for yourself the case where I noticed this feature was in 'BASS's
ProTracker where you go to 'Info' on the menu and then click on the
icon that gives you more info on Bass, you when get a large window in
which the mouse pointer is restrained to the boarders of the window).

Anyway, I digress, if you are at this stage and you press f12 for the
command line (error boxes won't allow this, that's why you can't do
this with them) and then quit the command line by simply pressing
RETURN you are returned to the desktop as normal BUT there is now no
restriction of the mouse movement.

I can't (as yet) see any positive nor negative consequences of this,
but I though I'd just mention it, just in passing as it were.

Meanwhile back to the subject in hand, the solid dragging - one thing
I've noticed is that only certain programs produce solid dragging
(Edit, Draw, etc) so I guess the program has to tell the wimp to do
it, why? It's not as if the wimp has to be told what sprite to use, as
it can work this out for itself (I assume). Surley just for
consistency all draged icons should be solid dragged, or none at all,
not an inbetween state.

Now there might, and probably is, be a very good reason for this. But
then again.....

Ian


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