FastLynx 2 Support - Sewell Direct

The FastLynx 2.01 slave program (sl2.exe) works in conjunction with the normal FastLynx 2.01 application (fx.exe) to save disk space for file transfer in special environments where disk space is at a premium. You would not need or want to use it if you are running on a normal desktop PC or a laptop with plenty of disk space.

The normal FastLynx program (fx.exe), together with its help file (fx.hlp) take up about 128K of disk space. For a normal desktop PC, that is a very small program these days. However, if you are using a handheld PC with only a few megabytes of non-volatile RAM storage, you want all of your programs to be as small as possible.

To achieve this goal for customers with these special requirements, we started with fx.exe and took out all but the bare essentials for file transfer. The result was a slave program, only 33K in size, that communicates with the fx.exe component of FastLynx 2.01. The idea is that you run the slave program on the handheld PC, and do all of your user interface commands from a normal PC running FastLynx 2.01. The only user input the slave program accepts is the ESC character, which tells it to exit. The rest of the time, the slave just sits and waits for commands from FastLynx. While transferring files, it does print out a display of what it is doing.

Naturally, to get down to 33K, we had to take out a lot of things. Following are lists of the features taken out and retained, so you can get an idea of what you can do with the slave.

Features in FastLynx (fx.exe) that are not in the Slave (sl2.exe)

• User interface to issue transfer commands
• Context-sensitive help and on-line guide
• On-the-fly data compression
• Accelerated parallel transfers (using the FX 2 cable)
• Windows VxD to boost transfer speeds under Windows

Features supported by both FastLynx (fx.exe) and the Slave (sl2.exe)

• Serial 3-wire transfers
• Accelerated serial 7-wire transfers
• Parallel transfers