Thanks - funny you should mention performance because I just added two new settings (and reposted the script) to speed things up a little:

QUICK_DRAW Enables faster screen drawing by disabling card drop & flip animation sequences. Did anybody notice that when your hand is dealt, the cards are dropped on the table one-by-one and then "flipped" over, then picked-up into view ? Anybody got any better ideas for a cooler (non-annoying) animation sequence ?

QUICK_DEAL Automatically redeals your hand after the payout box is displayed (no need to hit return twice)

Just manually make these setting changes in the script turn them on. And yes - I'm very pleased with the performance of KiXtart 2001 as well - especially considering all the overhead I introduced by using an object-oriented design approach. I think two things contribute to performance here ...

1) I tried to use the builtin BOX function as much as possible. This function packs a lot of low-level screen I/O power into a single KIX statement.

2) And you're right about the "pre-compile" for functions. Although "pre-scan" might be a better term. I remember Ruud mentioning (somewhere) that KiXtart now does a two pass scan through the memory resident script. The first pass scans for function names and caches pointers to them. The second one processes the script. Either that or he's caching the function pointers while loading the script. Do you know how things worked in the pre-2001 releases ?

Your desire to have function subroutines is already there. I tried it out a few days ago and it works great (although beta 1 always skipped the first command in UDF's without arguments - now fixed). This works in beta 2a...

code:

---

break on

ChkDrives

exit

function ChkDrives

 ?"Inside function CHKDRIVES..."

endfunction

---

st

[This message has been edited by Shawn (edited 27 April 2001).]