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Messages - Dariusz Piatkowski

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1
Applications / Re: BrainStorm: Best Classic OS/2 Software
« on: October 17, 2025, 04:26:41 pm »
I would love for the Visual SlickEdit to be released. The OS/2 version is soooo old that honestly I can't imagine (even remotely) the possibility of such code base impacting any of their current commercial products.


2
Slowed down again, though not as slow as previously. About 10 seconds to refresh this page. When I posted earlier it was close to instant.

I'm STILL w/ Dave on this one...yup, back to being slow!  :'(

3
Seems the issue is fixed, pages load fast here now.

I'm w/ Dave on this one, pretty speedy on my end.

4
...I will check the logs and ask the server team...

Thanks Martin for keeping the lights ON for us!!!

5
...just the last couple of days, as best as I can tell, there is a noticeable delay in getting page updates, has anyone else noticed that as well?

6
Setup & Installation / Re: Installing ZipCntrl
« on: September 03, 2025, 03:18:06 pm »
Neil,

One word of caution, at least based on what I have seen here with ZipControl:

1) using the latest unzip (6.00) produces an incorrect output (date & time stamp) within the ZipControl window

2) using unzip (5.52) gives the correct results

See attachments showing those results for both.

BTW: on my machine I am also seeing a weird situation when attempting to open multiple ZipControl windows at the same time, the 1st one is good, the 2nd window never shows up but the ZipControl process is started in the background...I have never been able to tell what's blocking the 2nd window from actually showing up though

7
Hardware / Re: SNAP Driver Source
« on: August 14, 2025, 01:49:49 pm »
Hey Andi!

...Now again about 8-10 years later my current system could not drive this resolution with current Panorama using AMD internal GPU. Additional ATI550 can be convinced to setup the right resolution. But then I've to set Virtualaddresslimit<=1536 as otherwise the system crashes immediately. But that's no useful option for me...

Just on a hunch, have you played with the 'Video Memory Limit' setting of the gaoption.exe?

Code: [Select]
Options for ATI Radeon X850 Series (device 0):

  Invert .................. Off
  Rotation ................ Off
  Flipped ................. Off
  Reduced DVI Timings...... Off
  Prefer 16 bit per pixel.. On
  Prefer 32 bit per pixel.. On
  Compressed Framebuffer... On
  Allow DDC BIOS........... On
  PCI bus mastering........ On
  Video memory packets..... On
  Hardware acceleration.... Full
  Multi Head Display....... Yes
     0: 1920 x 1200 (   0,   0,1920,1200)
     1: 1920 x 1200 (1920,   0,3840,1200)
  VESA DPVL Mode........... Off

Global options for all devices:

  Force VBE Fallback ...... Off
  Force VGA Fallback ...... Off
  Allow non-certified ..... On
  Disable write combining . Off
  Use BIOS for LCD panel... Auto
  Video Memory Limit....... 24 Mb
  Shared AGP memory size... 4096 Kb
  Use system memory driver. Off
  Disable DDC detection.... Off
  Enable AGP FastWrite..... Off
  Maximum AGP data rate.... 8X
  Virtual Display.......... Off

Once you execute that gaoption command that setting is saved and upon next reboot you'll find something like this in your graphics.log file ('==>' is mine for emphasis):

Code: [Select]
...
GA_enumerateDevices: Found 1 PCI/AGP display devices

Global options for all devices:
  Force VBE Fallback ...... Off
  Force VGA Fallback ...... Off
  Allow non-certified ..... On
  Disable write combining . Off
  Use BIOS for LCD panel... Auto
  Shared AGP memory size... 4096 KB
  Use system memory driver. Off
  Disable DDC detection.... Off
  Virtual Display.......... Off

Loading driver for device 0 (radeon.drv)
---------------------------------------------------------

==> Video memory limited to user supplied value of 24MB

Attempting to enable write combining, base = 0xD0000000, length = 0x01800000 ...
Failed: UNKNOWN ERROR!
Loading chipset filters...done.
Loading splash screen...done.

Graphics device configuration:
  Manufacturer......... ATI
  Chipset.............. Radeon X850 Series
  Bus Type............. PCI Express
==>  Memory............... 24576 KB
  DAC.................. ATI Internal 24 bit DAC
  Clock................ ATI Internal Clock
  Memory Clock......... 400 MHz
  Default Memory Clock. 400 MHz
  Maximum Memory Clock. 400 MHz
  Driver Revision...... 3.2, Build 29
  Driver Build......... May  2 2017
  Certified Version.... Not Certified

Graphics device options:
  Invert .................. Off
  Rotation ................ Off
  Flipped ................. Off
  Prefer 16 bit per pixel.. On
  Prefer 32 bit per pixel.. On
  PCI bus mastering........ On
  Hardware acceleration.... Full
...

I run a huge JFS cache of 1G...and given that my ATI X850 card is a 256M card I was running into issues early on allocating enough RAM for the cache. It is not until I pared that back to just about 24M (to account for 24-bit and resulting resolution over the two displays) that I was able to free up the system RAM for cache use.

Sooo...seeing as you have to play with the Virtualaddresslimit setting I wonder if that is worth a try (if you haven't done so already of course)?

8
Hardware / Re: SNAP Driver Source
« on: August 13, 2025, 05:30:15 pm »
Hi Dan!

I noticed this article:
https://www.arcanoae.com/arca-noae-licenses-snap-graphics-os2-code/
 from 2015

It do not remember seeing, a lot of use of this source code to expand the drivers to newer chips sets, instead more of a focus on vesa as a write once, run anywhere solution...

If you want the latest publicly available ScitTech SDK let me know and I can toss that up on my webserver. This is NOT the current AN owned SDK/source.

BTW: it is the same thing you can stil d/l from here => http://web.archive.org/web/20080907115037/http://scitechsoft.com/ftp/devel/full_depot_r23.zip

9
Hardware / Re: SNAP Driver Source
« on: August 13, 2025, 05:27:30 pm »
...Dariusz for example uses an X850 IIRC and has a dual monitor setup...

For what it's worth, I cannot even imagine a Desktop environment with a single display anymore. The fact that I can enjoy such a hardware setup on our OS/2 platform is THE reason why I will continue to use SNAP.

...At one point they were going to GPL the source, only happened with the SDK and eventually Arca Noae bought the rights. They're planning on extending it to support at least recent Intel chips. No idea how that is going...

So back in Jan_2016 I reached out to Lewis (AN) volunteering to help with the updates to the SNAP solution. My contribution would have been a tiny little thing, however having successfully used the previously available SDK and written some ATI X850 specific utils (such as GPU engine and memory speed adjusters) I thought I could at least help up with the mundane utils side of things.

Lewis explained some of the plans they had at that time, Steve Levine was going to lead that work, which over time transitioned to David A for basically caretaker type of a thing. Point being: I am not aware of ANY new capabilities having been added to the SNAP drivers since, short of a single SMP hang related fix (I believe).

I wish the case was different and perhaps part of my frustration stems from the fact that we could have done something, even the little things to continue to keep this thing afloat and heck, maybe even expanded by a tiny little amount to the more upgraded chipsets that still largely followed the same proven architectures of past releases.

10
Hey Eugene!

...This advice, this information is new for me. Firefox was released in 2018, today 2025.
Why this information was not distributed among OS/2 users?
We suffer all this time.. during the last 8 years.

Well, I would say this information has been out there in one form or another for quite some time now. Heck, I'm sure a lot of it can be found on this very forum...but I will agree with you, we always lacked a uniform "one source of recommendations" that would touch on all of these.

For me it's been a story of changing things little-by-little, testing over a few days (sometimes), and either keeping the profile settings, or reverting back to default.

Dave's hint is good but unfortunately the "about:support" does not provide the full listing that "about:config" does...so instead I've pulled the stuff from prefs.js file and removed the private stuff.

Given how old our FF is, it is becoming difficult to even find the correct Mozilla Dev references to all of these preferences...still, worth a shot.

-Dariusz

11
Start Firefox, 89%+ Utilization.

Current version of Firefox is unusable.
you can't use Bank web-sites, GMail, ..  News sites with never-ending stream of news.
Firefox goes crazy and hangs.

Excuse me????!!!!

Now now...GMail user here for years now...and running quite fine.

....but...as Dave mentioned, you need to prep for this: NoScript helps (but has it's own downsides), uBlock helps as well.

So what specifically do you have problems with re: gmail access?

To the OP (Dan):
There are some things our FF sturggles with, and as Dave already mentioned, some of them can literally peg your CPU to 100% (jscript is perfect example of one such 'bad actor'). I find that a SMP box can actually mange this well and in cases when this does happen there are plenty of remaining CPU cycles to carry on happily.

Keep in mind, I base this on my experience with a 6-core AMD Phenom II X6 CPU and my current AMD FX8370 which is a 8-core CPU. Even though the FX8370 is actually a weaker of the two CPUs, the two additional cores more than make up for what used to bring my PhenomII down completely.

So there are some FF profile settings which will enable you to deal with some of this.

Take a look at:
- content.interrupt.parsing
- content.max.tokenizing.time
- content.maxtextrun
- content.notify.backoffcount
- content.notify.interval
- content.notify.ontimer
- content.siwtch.threshold

All of the above control how FF responds to the updates and the frequency of rendering these updates to the screen.

Beyond these, you have the whole 'network.http.*' bucket which will control your keep-alive stuff, the connections-per-server, pipelining, etc., which when set accordingly to how you connect to the Internet can make a difference.

For what it's worth: if someone can tell me how to extract my settings I'm happy to u/l them here for further review. I think I can just get the flat text from one of the profile files too...let me know!

12
Utilities / Re: Job Scheduling
« on: August 08, 2025, 03:02:42 am »
I use CRON/2...pretty easy setups:

Code: [Select]
┌────────────────────────────────────┐
│            C R O N / 2             │
├────────────────────────────────────┤
│   A UN*X CRON clone for OS/2       │
│   with client/server networking    │
│                                    │
│            version 1.4n            │
│                                    │
│    Copyright (C) 1993 Bob Hood     │
│                  2001 Detlef Graef │
│                  2015-19 Yuri Dario│
└────────────────────────────────────┘

13
Hardware / Re: Smart Hard Drive Monitoring on AOS 5.1.1
« on: August 02, 2025, 10:16:27 pm »
Hey Dan!

The CLI stuff is out there (meaning available), but to ease with this stuff check out PMsmartctl:

Author: Peter Brown     email: losepete@losepete.plus.com?subject=PMsmartctl

What Peter did was to build a nifty little util that does a quick pass through your system, gives you a list of available devices and lets you select what SMART info you want to get (which is ultimately produced as a TEXT file).

Very easy to use, good control. Since we did the initial testing for Peter here on the forum I'm not sure where he's gone with this (if anywhere else?).

14
Programming / Re: Powerbasic for OS/2
« on: August 02, 2025, 09:38:24 pm »
You know (for what it's worth), IBM did release VisualAge Basic for OS/2!

Let me know if you want it, I have 1.27 release of this thing, circa 1996...but hey, nice VisualAge GUI would certainly halp.

BTW - I did actually have this installed on one of my OS/2 boxes as my son wanted to "figure out this programming thing"....lol, he was just starting up, and for those of us who similarly cut our teeth on BASIC I couldn't think of a better way to get him going...

15
Programming / Re: OS/2 WARP Programming for Dummies by Blake Watson
« on: July 25, 2025, 01:36:14 pm »
Dan,

I've got a few chapters of code saved up on my machine here...they are all circa 1999, so either because I was actually going through that stuff myself (which at some point in time I actually did, so a quick QC pass through the source should be done first LOL), or perhaps I actually downloaded them from somewhere.

If you want to just grab these I can literally ZIP the directory structure and post on my web server?

-Dariusz

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