TOS14FIX.PRG by Ken Badertscher Copyright 1989, Atari Corp. Contrary to commonly held beliefs, the system software engineers at Atari are human. That's right, human beings, one and all. And like most human beings, we make mistakes now and then. A couple of bugs made it into the Rainbow TOS release that we feel are serious enough to warrant an auto folder patch program, and that's what TOS14FIX is. The two bugs that are fixed by TOS14FIX are: 1) A change was made to the BIOS call that sets the RS-232 port configuration. Specifically, it did not allow RTS/CTS flow control to be enabled. This is a problem for people with serial printers and high speed modems, since those devices use RTS/CTS flow control to start and stop data transmission so that the device can keep up with the computer. If you have Rainbow TOS, and you use a high-speed serial device which requires RTS/CTS flow control, you need this program in your auto folder. 2) A much less significant bug crept into an internal routine which the AES uses to parse file names. The bottom line is that under extenuating circumstances, it could be possible that a GEM program would not be able to successfully load a resource file or to find a file using the AES shell library call shel_find(). The patch program replaces the internal AES call. All you need to do to use TOS14FIX.PRG is put it in your auto folder, or run it from the desktop. If it successfully installs the patches, it will print a message to that effect. If the version of TOS in your machine does not require these patches, then it will print nothing. Technical Notez =============== TOS14FIX does its work by patching into the vectors for the calls which it replaces. It copies the actual patch code into an area of low memory which is specifically reserved in TOS for this purpose. This means that having the patches installed will use no extra memory in your computer. Not only that, but these patches will not slow your system down whatsoever, because they replace completely the system calls which they fix. The patch program also installs a reset handler so that the patch can de-install itself when you do a warm boot (normally the area of memory reserved for programs like this will survive a warm boot). The patch program will be completely transparent to anything you do, except, of course, the bugs won't be there!