Doc file for SilkMouse 3.2 Copyright (c) 1993 Mark Slagell 609 Church Street, St. Johns, MI 48879 SilkMouse 3.2 at a glance: ========================== ... has a uniquely smooth, fast, well-behaved mouse accelerator ... has a screen saver that won't intrude on your work ... compensates for a hardware bug in Atari keyboards ... allows you to freeze the screen after applications when needed ... installs from a small program in the AUTO folder ... can be customized from the desktop or the accessory menu ... runs on any Atari ST, STe, TT or Falcon030 computer. How to install SilkMouse ======================== If you are currently using a mouse accelerator or screen saver, remove or disable it. Copy SILKMOUS.PRG to your AUTO folder. Optionally, you can also install the SMC utility. It is supplied here in two forms, accessory and CPX module. The accessory can be renamed with a .PRG extender and run from the desktop if desired. SMC allows you to enable or disable each feature of SilkMouse, and to generally tweak the whole thing to your taste. But its use is not essential. Reboot, and SilkMouse will install. Mouse accelerator feature ========================= SilkMouse "accelerates" the mouse in a radically different fashion from its competitors. The design objective was never acceleration as such, but resolution-independence, i.e., uniformity of response in all resolutions. To achieve this, SilkMouse establishes a distance-to- distance relationship between mouse movement and pointer movement, whereas you are used to (and, I assure you, subliminally frustrated by) a distance-to-pixels relationship. Acceleration is a natural by- product. Also, the Alt-arrow keys get along better with SilkMouse than with other accelerators. It's important to take some time to get used to the feel of SilkMouse. At first it may seem too fast, even if you are used to another accelerator; this only means you are working too hard. Because SilkMouse is not inherently jerky, and because it does not distort the mouse pointer's angle of motion as other accelerators do, you will quickly learn the correct gentle motions to reliably get the pointer where you want it without backtracking. What, you never noticed your old mouse accelerator distorting the angle of mouse motion? Using almost any other accelerator, try moving the mouse diagonally at a moderate speed, or in rapid circles; you'll see. The traditional acceleration method discourages diagonal motion by sharply bending the pointer trajectory parallel to one axis or the other. Among true mouse accelerators (as opposed to doublers), only SilkMouse is entirely free from that effect. Screen saver feature ==================== SilkMouse's screen saver is not meant to entertain you, or to frustrate you, but to extend the useful life of your monitor without unexpectedly blanking the display while you're looking at it. The screen saver is effective in all screen modes on the ST/STe/TT, and in all but the "true color" modes on the Falcon030. When a predefined time has elapsed with no input from mouse or keyboard (or, optionally, modem), the display inverts and goes to half intensity. For example, black text on a white background becomes gray text on a black background. The screen remains in this state for an interval that is some multiple of the original delay, then goes black. At any time, bumping the mouse or pressing any key restores the original display. The invert/dim algorithm is really the best for your monitor, as it assures even use of all areas of the screen and prevents burn-in. It's best for your convenience too; even after protection begins, information on the screen remains visible for some time. When a monochrome monitor is attached, a screenful of memory is reserved during bootup. This allows the screen saver to mimic its color behavior even though the hardware does not support much palette manipulation. When changing states from normal to dimmed, the screen is either simply inverted (if the background was white), or dimmed by masking every other pixel (if the background was black). In the former case, all screen activity remains continuously viewable. In the latter, the display is updated every five seconds. In both cases the display blanks completely after a while. You may disable this feature when you save defaults; this saves some memory, but makes the saver unable to blank or dim the mono screen. In that case it simply inverts periodically, as it did in earlier versions. Function key guard feature ========================== All Atari computers manufactured to date (at least, the ones I've used) have a problem in the keyboard. It happens when a shift key is held down and two other adjacent keys are pressed at about the same time. The keyboard will in that case sometimes erroneously report a shift-F1 or shift-F3, in addition to one or both of the keys actually pressed. If you've never noticed, it's because you are an exceptionally careful typist, or because none of your programs does anything interesting when you press shift-F1 or shift-F3 anyway. But it is a problem for a number of people. The keyguard feature effectively cures the glitch. This feature must be turned on with the SMC utility in order to work; it is off by default because of possible conflicts with key-macro utilities. Such conflicts can also often be resolved by changing the order in which your AUTO programs run. Hold-screen option ================== The main use of this feature is for reading the screen output of a program run from the desktop, when that program was designed to run from a command line shell. Y/u know the feeling. You run an unfamiliar program, it prints a screen full of something which immediately disappears, and you're back at the desktop. You wonder if there's a command line option option option option option ed some explaining. There is no table of distances to fill in, and no simple slow/fast adjustment. It may help your understanding somewhat to think of a three-speed transmission designed to run in the middle gear most of the time. SilkMouse can differentiate between much lower physical mouse speeds than any other accelerator; that capability makes for almost imperceptibly smooth shifts, higher overall acceleration, and better control. What can be adjusted under this scheme are the physical mouse speeds assigned to the shift points, and to some extent, the gear ratios. ** I recommend leaving the following adjustments at or near their defaults, at least until you are used to the feel of the accelerator. Remember, resolution compensation is automatic in SilkMouse, so there is no need to change these settings when you change resolutions. Top gear sensitivity: the physical speed at which we shift from second gear into third. [C] is the default setting; [D] is a little quicker. If you choose [A], top gear is effectively disabled. Top gear ratio: how fast third gear is relative to second. This is not the _absolute_ acceleration ratio for top gear, because second gear's ratio varies with screen resolution. This default setting of [x2.5] is sufficient to allow you to generally cover the screen without having to move the heel of your hand. Higher ratios diminish smoothness. Middle gear sensitivity: the shift point for first gear into second. The default setting is [3]. If you do lots of detailed free-hand drawing you may prefer a lower setting; if you work only with text and/or icons you may want it higher. Resolution correction limit: in very high-resolution graphics modes (beyond 640x480), this enhances small-scale mouse control somewhat at the expense of resolution-independence. It is on by default, [x2]; when it is on, TT monochrome users may want to experiment with the top gear adjustments for better screen coverage. The following adjustments apply to the screen saver. Initial delay: how long the saver waits before taking effect, in minutes. With every input from the keyboard or mouse, this timer is reset. Dim time factor: how long, relative to the initial delay time, the screen stays in its dimmed state before going blank. For example, if the saver were set to 10 minutes initial delay and [x2] dim time factor, the display would invert and dim after 10 minutes of no input, and stay that way for the next 20 minutes before going black. Watch modem condition: determines whether, and how, signals from the RS232 port are acted upon by the screen saver. If "off", all serial input is ignored. If set to "port", all signals from RS232 and MIDI restore the screen and reset the saver clock, just as if you had pressed a key. The "buffer" setting watches the system's serial input buffer but not MIDI; the price of such selectiveness is insensitivity in the presence of anything that sets up a custom serial input buffer (as some terminal programs do), so the "port" setting is generally better to use. Reserve mono screen: tells SILKMOUS.PRG whether to reserve a screenful of memory when booting in mono. This is only effective with the next boot, so remember to save defaults after changing this setting. To understand the consequences of reserving or not reserving memory, read above about the screen saver. SilkMouse may be freely distributed as long as the following files are included and unaltered: SILKMOUS.PRG, SILKMOUS.DOC, SMC.ACC, and SMC.CPX. It may not be distributed in any modified or abridged form. As of version 3.1, I accept but no longer solicit payment for SilkMouse. Those who do wish to make some kind of contribution may do so via GEnie gift of time to M.SLAGELL, or with a check made out to Mark Slagell (not SilkWare) and mailed to the address at the top of this document. I welcome comments and suggestions, and reply to all correspendence. The current version of SilkMouse is always available from the GEnie software library, and from Suzy B's Software (voice 716-298-1986). Mark Slagell September 22, 1993