Atari XL manual LW.SYS File, Configuration Using a Supported DOS, Banks 1,2,3,4

The Last Word 3.0 Reference Manual

8.3 THE LW.SYS FILE

The LW.SYS file is read once when LW first starts up. The information in the file is used to set-up LW’s memory configuration and other settings that can’t be changed once the program has finished setting itself up. LW.SYS must be written as a plain text file in the editor. Most of the time, the memory configuration commands in LW.SYS will be unnecessary, since the settings it affects are usually automatically configured. However, there may be occasions when it’s desirable to override these settings. LW.SYS is also necessary if you wish to manually disable LW’s built-in keyboard buffer or remap the keyboard, or define the LW search path on non-SpartaDOS X systems.

LW.SYS may contain the following instructions:

Instruction	Arguments	Comments	Default
BANKED	ON¦OFF	Turn banked memory usage on	ON (with
		or off	supported
			DOSes)
BANKS	n,n,n,n…	Specify banks to be used (from	Depends on
		LW’s internal list)	available
			memory
RESERVE	n	Reserve # banks for extensions	0
EXTPAGES	n	Reserve # pages for extension	0
		code
BUFFER	ON¦OFF	Turn internal keyboard buffer on	ON (unless
		or off	SDX buffer
			installed)
PATH	Dn:<path>	Set LW search path	none
KEY	code,atascii	Attach code “atascii” to keycode	none
		“code”

8.3.1 CONFIGURATION USING A SUPPORTED DOS

When using LW with a supported DOS (DOS 2.5, MyDOS, and SpartaDOS X), the program will automatically detect any extended memory on the machine and avoid those banks used by DOS/RAMdisks (providing the default RAMdisk drivers are used with DOS 2.5 and MyDOS). While manual configuration of the memory banking scheme should be unnecessary under these circumstances, it’s still possible to override the default settings.

Using a supported DOS, LW will scan the hardware to establish how many extended memory banks are installed in the system, then subtract from the resulting list those banks used by DOS (the only exception is SpartaDOS X, which helpfully provides its own built-in list of unused banks). The result is a list of the free banks on the system, rather than a list of all the banks installed on the machine. You may specify a selection of banks from this list as follows:

BANKS 1,2,3,4

Under DOS 2.5, MyDOS or SDX, this line will tell LW to use the first four banks from the list of free banks the program generated when it first initialized (the banks are ordered numerically according to the PORTB banking value, and are numbered beginning at 1). If there aren’t enough free banks to fulfil the amount requested by “BANKS”, as many as are available will be allocated. In the above example –

8-53