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- 04/22/92
- Slower v1.0, the fast system slowdown utility by Kenneth Kline,
- certain "Copyleft" privileges retained.
-
- Unsolicited donations welcome. Solicited donations sent at donors
- discretion. If you find that this program is helpful to you
- and want to say thanks, $2.00 US cash or money order drawn on US
- funds (no checks, PLEASE!) may be sent directly to me at:
-
- 34 Monmouth Ave.
- Clementon, NJ 08021-7115 USA
-
- $5.00 will get the next version sent directly to your continental
- USA (only) address as soon as (and if) it becomes available.
- Anything in excess of $5.00 will be donated to the Animal Welfare
- Association or similar charity org., and will be appreciated.
-
- Inasmuch as I am placing the software into the public domain, I
- relegate all responsibility for it's behavior on the users' system
- to the user. If you wish to forego your responsibility in this
- respect, don't run the program. If you don't read the docs, don't
- bitch.
-
- Rates and terms subject to change at author's discretion without
- prior warning; you may have contradictory legal rights...
-
- This program is a TSR. It intercepts the timer interrupt, calls the
- original timer interrupt, disables interrupts, displays the current
- time on the upper left-hand corner of your screen and enters a
- simple do-nothing loop for a count (from 0) to a user specified
- value before re-enabling interrupts and returning. This
- effectively slows down your system and allows such things as
- playing older games on newer, faster systems, giving you an added
- edge over some of the faster-paced arcade-style games, debugging
- program output, and/or increasing the amount of time screen images
- are displayed so you can capture them.
-
- I make no guarantees that this will be successful in every case,
- nor do I make any warranties against system crashes, damage, and/or
- loss as a result of using this program in some combination of other
- programs on some systems. All I can tell you in this regard is that
- it should work in a large number of cases, I don't know of any
- reason for it to crash, and that it hasn't caused me any damage yet.
-
- To use the program, at the DOS prompt type SLOWER and press return.
- You will be prompted for a slowdown factor from 0 to 32767. Higher
- values entered make the machine slower while entering zero will
- have very little effect on the system speed (if you just want the
- clock in the upper left corner, enter 0). Entering a negative
- value will abort the TSR installation. The only totally safe way
- to disable the TSR function and un-install it is to reboot the
- machine by pressing your reset button or shutting down and
- restarting the system. There are utilities that claim to be able
- to uninstall unruly TSRs... They may or may not work with this
- program.
-
- Precautions!
- DO NOT run the program twice without either rebooting or running an
- uninstall program. Running this program twice will almost
- assuredly cause your system to lock up! If this happens by
- accident, rebooting is your only recourse. It is also unadvisable
- to run this utlity from within other programs that allow
- "launching" of applications or temporarily shelling to DOS.
- Running Slower from within multitasking and task-swapping shells
- will almost always lead to catastrophe. DON'T DO IT.
-
- Slower is a very powerful utility. On my 25MHz 386 I can count
- seconds between hitting the enter key and seeing the DOS prompt
- return when I set the delay to 32767. Start out with much lower
- delays especially if you are running at less than 25MHz.
- Experiment with the setting, rebooting between successive attempts,
- to tweek in the right value for your game/application.
-
- Special considerations should be given to disk accesses. When
- programs write to the disk, they update pointers in sensitive areas
- on the disk (e.g. the FAT and DIR). While a program that only
- reads the disk won't present any difficulties when using this
- program, if you aren't sure whether the disk is being read from or
- written to, DO NOT reboot until the disk settles completely.
- Rebooting before this time will corrupt data being written. If
- this happens, run DOS's CHKDSK with the /F option or another good
- disk repair program. Chances are you will be able to recover most
- if not all lost data. For this reason it is suggested that you
- thoroughly test the application with this utility on a floppy
- and/or after making a complete backup of any files your application
- might use.
-
- Note: The clock may disappear while running some programs -- this
- is normal. The clock will usually re-appear after the program has
- returned to DOS. On some systems (monochrome, for instance) the
- clock might not appear at all. This is to be expected -- the clock
- is written directly to video RAM at segment B800 hex -- no check is
- made to determine if this is the correct segment for the system.
-
- Viruses: I am not a cretin. I make no purposeful attempts to
- damage other peoples' property. If you suspect that this program
- has been infected, please alert your BBS SysOp or distribution-site
- manager.
-
- Distribution fees: additional terms for distribution sites (you may
- have contradictory legal rights...). Although the software has
- been placed in the public domain, for this version I retain certain
- "copyleft" privileges. Please charge no more than $5.00 US above
- and beyond any "normal" consideration for collection and/or
- distribution of this software.
-