TESTER.TXT	20-MAY-2003

Run TEST.BAT to test your ENTRY.COM for validity. This executes
TESTER <KEYS.TXT and takes about a minute to run (on an 850 MHz Duron).

KEYS.TXT is created by MAKEKEYS, which is a modified version of EXAMPLE
that sends all keystrokes to the file specified on the command line
(MAKEKEYS >KEYS.TXT). It also sends a dot (.) for each timer tick if
there was no keystroke. Because of a sync problem (that I'm too lazy to
chase down right now) KEYS.TXT must be edited to delete one "." before
the space character used to start the next game.

Unfortunately TESTER.COM does not run properly under Windows. Two
versions were tried: 98 and 3.1. Apparently Windows is also calling
interrupts 16h and/or 1Ah. Even restarting in MS-DOS mode under Windows
is not sufficient to make the tester work. You must boot directly into
PURE DOS. It might even be a good idea to boot into safe mode. The tester
works fine on three different computers running DOS 5 and 7. (Perhaps some
of you wizards can fix the problem. I hate Windoze!)

There is at least one thing that the tester does not check for. It's
possible that when a tetromino starts, it immediately completes the top
row and clears it. It requires extra code in an entry to properly handle
this extremely unlikely situation. In the interest of sacrificing Ruud's
left foot, I'm inclined to not penalize entries that do not make sure
that the top row has been erased from the screen.


27-MAY-2003

If you're having trouble running the test suite on your system then
TESTERX should solve the problem. It's a slightly modified version of
TESTER that uses vectors 60h and 61h instead of 16h and 1Ah to access the
keyboard and system tick count. This enables it to work with Windows and
a floppy disk drive (and everyting I could find to test it on).

The drawback is that your ENTRY.COM must temporarily substitute vectors
16h and 1Ah with 60h and 61h (respectively) to run the test. Don't
attempt to run this modified ENTRY.COM directly because it will hang.

Sorry for this ugly solution. A more elegant solution, that looked at the
contents of the stack to distinguish whether a call to 1Ah was from
ENTRY.COM or not, did not work under Windows 98. Replacing vector 16h was
necessary to make it run under Windows 3.1.

-Boreal
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