MACCEL2.PRG by Ken Badertscher Copyright 1989, Atari Corp. Why another mouse accelerator? ============================== I guess just don't get enough punishment working on the other system software here at Atari. History: Once upon a time, there was this mysterious three-hundred-odd byte program that had the peculiar side-effect of accelerating the mouse cursor. I'm not sure what else it did, but then, I only wrote it. Later on, this program got a little more useful - it let you communicate with it, it put up informative messages, it was able to find itself in memory so you couldn't run it twice (running it twice or more would result in hilarious consequences if you so much as bumped the mouse), and so on. It was still a bit primitive, however. Months later, I decided that I needed another breed of screen saver - it seemed that all the ones I had featured, um, interesting side-effects. What better place to put a screen saver than in a mouse accelerator, right? And while I was at it, I could spruce up the mouse accelerator, right? Right. Here it is. Mouse Accelerator //. It uses a new-and-improved algorithm for acceleration - you may like the feel of it better than the original MACCEL. You may even enjoy the screen saver, but if you don't you can always disable it. I'm sure that you'll like the means of communicating with MACCEL2 better than MACCEL. What was I thinking of when I came up with ControlShiftAltLeftClick?! Using MACCEL2 ============= First you need to put MACCEL2.PRG in your auto folder. You don't need to reboot; you can install it from the desktop. MACCEL2 functions both as an auto folder program that installs the mouse accelerator and screen saver and as a configuration program that allows you to change the way it operates. After you have put MACCEL2.PRG in your auto folder, run it from the desktop. You will be presented with a dialog box that has a title at the top, three rows of selection buttons, and some actions at the bottom. Let's deal with them in order: Selections ========== The first row of selection buttons are for Acceleration. You have two choices, Fast or Slow. Selecting a button will activate that speed, so try them out and see which one you like. The second row turns the Screen Saver On or Off. (The interesting capitalization here is to emphasize what appears in the dialog.) If you have the screen saver on, after about four minutes of inactivity, it will kick in. If you have a color monitor, your monitor will go black. Don't panic, your monitor is not broken, just bump the mouse or hit a key (even a shift key) and the display will be restored. If you have a monochrome monitor, it will toggle black-white/white-black about every 15 seconds or so. This prevents an image from "burning in" to your monochrome monitor by constantly flip-flopping the image. Bump the mouse or hit a key to restore a sane display. The third row of selection buttons has the mysterious title "Watch Modem." This feature is useful if you, like me, tend to spend too much time on BBS's and online services. If you are watching a live CB discussion or reading long messages on an online service, there may be a long period of time during which you don't touch a key or use the mouse. It would be most annoying for the screen saver to kick in while you're reading a message. That's what "Watch Modem" is for. If you select Yes, the screen saver timer will be reset by characters coming in the modem port as well as by keyboard or mouse activity. If you run a BBS, you should set "Watch Modem" to No, so that the screen saver timer won't be constantly reset by your callers. Actions ======= Finally, let's look at the row of action buttons at the bottom, from right to left. As with most dialog boxes, the rightmost button is Cancel. If you have not yet installed the mouse accelerator, selecting Cancel will exit the program without installing it. If you have already installed the mouse accelerator, select Cancel to exit the program and restore the accelerator to the state it was in before you started messing with the selection buttons. The middle action button is Save. You can save the current mouse accelerator configuration directly into your copy of MACCEL2.PRG. It expects to find itself in the auto folder of your boot device. If it isn't there, or if you have renamed it, you can tell it that you want to Locate your copy of MACCEL2.PRG; it will present you with a standard file selector so that you can locate it. If you make a mistake and select the wrong file, you needn't worry. MACCEL2 is fairly intelligent about saving its configuration - it won't try to save a configuration in a program that isn't MACCEL2, or in a text file, for example. It will let you know if it had any problems saving the configuration. The next time you boot using the configured copy of MACCEL2.PRG, it will use the defaults you have set. The left action button is the default button, and it has a different label depending on whether or not MACCEL2 has been installed since you booted your ST. If it has not yet been installed, the button will read "Install", and selecting it will install the mouse accelerator with the selections you have made via the selection buttons. If it has already been installed, the button will read "Configure", and selecting it will reconfigure MACCEL2 based on the selection button settings. In either case, selecting this button will exit the program. NOTE: Selecting "Configure" will not permanently save your configuration; you must use the "Save" button to do that. Configure will only configure the MACCEL2 that is currently installed in memory. Th-th-th-that's all, folks! =========================== That's about all there is to it! Next time you boot with MACCEL2 in your auto folder, it will install the mouse accelerator and screen saver (depending on how you have configured it), and print the message "Mouse Accelerator 2 installed." If you need to reconfigure it for any reason, just open a window onto your auto folder and run it from the desktop any time. If you're concerned about how much memory MACCEL2 uses, don't be. Almost all of the program goes away after it has installed the mouse accelerator and screen saver drivers. The critical parts have been written in assembly to be as small and as fast as they can be.