DollarLink News -- January 31, 1995

Enhancements Added

Improved Error Checking

DollarLink scrutinizes every new quote from the datafeed before accepting it as a valid price/volume record. This is done continuously throughout the day. Each quote gets checked for consistency (for example, the high of the day cannot be less than the low of the day; total volume must increase during the day) and for error spikes.

DollarLink compares the last accepted price field against the price in the incoming quote. If the absolute difference is greater than a user-set threshold (the default is 25%), the incoming quote is thrown out.

Error-checking can be disabled or changed on the fly while in DollarLink by pressing Control+E key combination and then I while in text mode. The change will be in effect for the duration of the current DollarLink session. To permanently change the error checking status, run the SETUP utility outside of DollarLink. The appropriate question is 38 in Part 1 of SETUP.

This error checking is quite effective in its attempt to eliminate data spikes. However, it may get confused by stock splits. When it sees a stock that split, DollarLink thinks it is an error and sometimes it throws out the baby with the bath water by not accepting the new quote. Typically, the user sees that a stock stopped updating and there is an asterisk next to the price on the quote pages. The solutions is to disable error checking temporarily to allow the new price to come in and be accepted.

To prevent this excessive error checking, we now do not check for spike errors on the very first real-time quote of the day. This should take care of the splits because stocks usually start trading at the new split price at the beginning of the day, not in the middle of the day.

You can still force DollarLink to error-check even the first quote of the day if you start DollarLink with

$ XERR [enter]

The Universal VESA Graphics Card

The world of SuperVGA graphics cards does not have a strong standard. IBM introduced the VGA standard around 1987 and all the other graphics card makers cloned it. VGA became a hard standard; everybody followed it. After that, in order to get market share, competing manufacturers started enhancing VGA cards by adding more colors and/or higher resolution capabilities. Everybody did this on their own without having a universal standard in mind. To make matters more confusing, everybody called their own design SuperVGA.

To clean up this mess, the Video Electonics Standards Association (VESA) came up with a set of SuperVGA specifications which the manufacturers have more-or-less implemented. However, since VESA is a voluntary organization and since most users don't switch graphics cards very often, many manufacturers continue to ignore the VESA standard claiming that their own design is better.

This is why in DollarLink we supply SuperVGA graphics by brand name the SuperVGA standard is not consistent. We also provide a VESA driver for both 800 by 600 and the 1024 by 768 resolutions. Unfortunately, many graphics cards don't support the VESA standard.

Since we cannot possibly support all the proprietary SuperVGA standards, we provide a VESA driver for both 800 by 600 and the 1024 by 768 resolutions. Unfortunately, many graphics card don't support the VESA standard.

We have found a possible solution for those of you who have a graphics card that does not support VESA. It is a small memory-resident freeware program that figures out what brand of the graphics card you have and then forces the card to behave like a VESA card. It uses about 7K of RAM and can be loaded high.

This VESA emulator is called UniVesa and we distribute it with our other utilities as part of the package.

It is simple to use. First, run the SETUP program and in part 3 tell DollarLink you have a VESA SuperVGA (either 800x600 or 1024x768).

Then, every time before you start DollarLink, execute the following command from the DOS prompt while in the DollarLink directory

UNIVESA [enter]

That's it. Now DollarLink will think your PC has a VESA card. (It also works with the dual-monitor feature in DollarLink, if you have it set up that way.)

Caution:

UniVesa has been tested with many, but not all, graphics cards. It is about a year old and may not work with some of the newer cards.

3.5" diskettes

Following the industry-wide trend, we now distribute all our software on 3.5" diskettes. If you don't have a 3.5" drive, we strongly suggest you have one installed in your PC (the cost of a 3.5" drive is about $50).

If you want us to send software updates on 5.25" diskettes, please remind us when you request the updates.

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