warp & the tp750?

[strat@dsd.northrop.com (Scott Stratmoen)]

Sorry about not changing the header on the last message!


I also have some observations / questions about Warp installs on the
750. In the following discussion assume that the hardware configuration
includes a dock II, Sound Blaster AWE-32, PCMCIA modem and Ethernet cards.

1) The dock II's SCSI irq is normally set to 11. This in turn conflicts
with the irq that OS/2 uses to detect a status change on PCMCIA slots
3/4 (i.e. in the dock). This means that a different IRQ is needed.

Can any of the IRQ's in the configuration stated above be shared? (You
will see why later.)

FYI: Also note that the installer doesn't detect this conflict and you
loose the CDROM after the install finishes. (This took me a long time to
figure out!)

2) The Crystal Semi drivers that ship with warp don't manage the dock's
audio correctly. In this I mean that the normal drivers (windows or os/2
which shipped with the Thinkpad) disables the speaker in the pad and
sends the sound through the dock. What occurs with the Warp drivers is
that the gain of the pad's speaker is much greater than what is coming
out of the dock. Thus you can't really hear the dock's audio!

Another problem with Warp's drivers is that they turn the TP's audio to
full every time a sound is played. It would appear that the author assumed
that you would use the OS/2 volume control and not the f5/f6 keys.

If the thinkpad's drivers are used, I don't think it is possible to get
sound to work with windows. Is this true? (Maybe it's a don't care as I
should be using the AWE for the dock at all times!)

Is it possible to write a REXX program to change the multimedia
configuration? (i.e. switch system sounds between Digital Audio 1 and
DA2?)

3) The AWE requires an interrupt, but I ran out. What I did was to
allocate the parallel port's irq to the second PCMCIA controller (in the
dock). For the Ethernet, I utilized Com2. This left the modem without
it's own irq. It should be possible to share com1's irq, assuming that
you don't need to use both at the same time. This didn't work.

For the modem I was forced to disable com1 in the pad and let the modem
map to com1.

4) The mouse gain sucks. <- period

There have been a number of people on the Compuserve tp forum which
complain about trashing their red buttons in less than a year. In
addition they are the same people who state that the cover is too slick.
I would point out that they are the same people who use OS/2!

It would appear that the OS/2 model is one of low gain with a high
acceleration. It's not what I am used to with normal windows setups.
I looked at the new Microsoft Intellepoint driver. It comes with an OS/2
driver. Has anyone tried it?

-- 
Scott A. Stratmoen | strat@ast.dsd.northrop.com
                   | (708) 259-9600 (ex 24762)