🚀 go-pugleaf

Ralf Brown's spawn replacement routines have been mentioned in the recent
discussions on how to shrink the size of your program.

In Ralf's doc's, he says that his code may fail under DOS 5 as he depends on
the size of the PSP.  DOS3.3 has lots of room, and 4 has some, but he thought
that 5 might have made the PSP large enough (or the used portion anyway) that
SPAWNO would not work.

Well, I have been running with my own replacement for COMMAND.COM for some
time now (under 3.3); this program is obviously one I don't want to have in
memory when my applications are running.  I am VERY PLEASED to announce that
Ralf's code still works properly.  The XMS swapping is lightning fast.  I no
longer bother to load a RAM disk; the swap is much faster when it goes to the
DOS5 HIMEM XMS driver.

I have only been running DOS5 for a little while now (except for the beta
testers, haven't we all?) so I cannot be certain that SPAWNO will work in all
environments, but it still works for me.  My shell uses SPAWNO for every 
program I run, so if feel highly confident that I won't have any problems.

It's interesting to note that the task swapper also swaps to XMS and disk, so
you may wish to set the XMS enable variable (in your code) to 0 if you use the
task swapper alot.  This way your program will only swap to disk (or EMS, but
there is also an enable variable for EMS).

If there is a problem with SPAWNO and DOS5 that someone has found, could they
please let me know?

Harry.
harry@aeshq.UUCP