Miscellaneous Problems
The Three Grazers
by Nial Smith
2006 Edinburgh CowParade
Problems with Cogent Graphics
Often users will encounter cryptic error messages when trying to use the
graphics capabilities of Cogent 2000 -- despite the fact that they have used
commands with proper syntax. Past experience reveals that the most
frequent cause of such errors is FAILURE TO ENABLE DIRECTDRAW GRAPHICS
ACCELERATION. You can run the DXDIAG program in order to determine if
DirectDraw graphics acceleration is currently disabled on your computer as
follows:
Step 1: Start | Run | dxdiag
Step 2. After DXDIAG finishes scanning the system at startup, click on the
DISPLAY tab.
Step 3. Find the region titled "DirectX Features" and make sure that
"DirectDraw Acceleration" is ENABLED.
Occasionally, Windows XP users will find that "DirectDraw Acceleration" is
listed as UNAVAILABLE and no option appears for enabling it. If you are
using a graphics card that was manufactured after 1998 it is highly probable
that the drivers for that card support DirectDraw acceleration. Experience
has found that this situation usually occurs as the result of a strange side
effect of Microsoft Netmeeting's Remote Desktop feature. For some reason
yet to be fully understood, the Netmeeting Remote Desktop (which is enabled by
default on many Windows XP Pro installations) appears to "hack" DirectX and
disable its graphics acceleration features. When this occurs, DXDIAG
cannot recognize this functionality; and, hence, cannot enable hardware
acceleration. The solution to this problem is to disable the Remote
Desktop feature. This can be done in several ways. If the REMOTE
DESKTOP icon appears in your system tray you can click it and disable it from
the context menu. However, you will need to repeat this action every time
your restart your computer. A more permanent solution can be accomplished
by starting Netmeeting and disabling the Remote Desktop feature using the
following procedure:
Step 1. Start | Run | conf %This will start
Netmeeting
Step 2. If this is the first time you have run Netmeeting, you will need
to follow the setup wizard until the program finally begins.
Step 3. From the Tools menu, select the "Remote Desktop sharing..."
option.
Step 4. Uncheck "Enable Remote Desktop Sharing on this computer".
Problems with the Mouse
The Cogent 2000 mouse functions are extremely finicky when operating in
"windowed" display mode. Usually their operation is much more robust when
run under full screen graphics mode. This makes program debugging a
bit awkward; but, alas, it's the cost of doing business.
UserPort Problems
Some folks have found that their Cogent 2000 scripts using the inportb()
and/or outportb() commands stop working when they upgrade to a new
computer. This problem usually results from the fact that the 3rd party
software driver known as UserPort does not behave well on newer systems
using CPU hyperthreading. One solution for this problem is to disable CPU
hyperthreading via the BIOS Setup program. However, this is quite a
draconian fix. A better approach is to abandon the use of Userport
(and the inportb and outportb commands) and adopt our new and
improved io32 approach to port I/O. Besides,
inportb() and outportb() are way too slow to be of practical use.
Case Sensitivity Problems
see C2K-updates