Wordstar 2000 and DOS 4.01

The FORMAT DESIGN option on the opening menu of Wordstar 2000 does not work if Wordstar is running under DOS 4.01 and CONFIG.SYS contains the SHELL command.

To resolve this problem, remove the SHELL command from CONFIG.SYS and ensure that COMMAND.COM resides in the root directory. The main disadvantage of this will be apparent if the SHELL command is used to specify an increased environment size, for example:

SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM /E:1024 /P

If it proves necessary to increase the environment size to greater than the default of 256 bytes, this may be done using the COMMAND command from the C:\> prompt, for example:

COMMAND /E:512 /P

The difficulty with this is that the above command ALSO runs AUTOEXEC.BAT. For this reason, if this command is included in AUTOEXEC.BAT, it will loop continually. To avoid this, insert the following lines at the beginning of AUTOEXEC.BAT:

@ECHO OFF
IF EXIST apricot.$$$ GOTO CONTINUE_AUTOEXEC *1
ECHO > apricot.$$$
COMMAND /E:1024 /P *2
:CONTINUE_AUTOEXEC
DEL apricot.$$$

This will create a temporary file until the environment size has been reset, then it will be deleted.

MICROPRO, the suppliers of Wordstar, have been alerted and are investigating the problem.

*1 apricot.$$$ is a temporary filename which is used and deleted.

*2 desired environment size.

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