WinBlank -- A screen blanker that works along with Windows

WinBlank (and the companion program Blank) supports screen
blanking that is usable in conjunction with Windows. Most screen
blankers run a timer that blanks the screen after a specified
interval, and will restore the screen upon keyboard input or output to
the video BIOS. Under Windows, of course, much of the action is via
the mouse, not noticed by most blankers. Worse yet, Windows grabs the
keyboard interrupt, and the average screen blanker only gets notified
on CAPS LOCK, NUM LOCK, and SCROLL LOCK. The end result is you
acquire a nervous twitch hitting those keys now and then. Not what
you want.

WinBlank fixes that. Thanks to the recent Windows Developers BB
messages from Daniel Smith, it's possible to write programs that
successfully use the WindowsHook feature. WinBlank does that to hook
into the global Windows message stream, and uses that information to
reset the blanker timer whenever an "interesting" message flies by.
In the version provided here, interesting amounts to mouse action or
keyboard action.

WinBlank is in two parts. First is BLANK.COM, which you run only
once, likely from your autoexec.bat file. It's a standard screen
blanker, with options to allow it to be configured for EGA, CGA, MONO,
and EGA+MONO screen configurations. You can also set an option to
select the blanking timer duration. The version in the ARC file is
setup for 5 minutes blanking interval, and both an EGA and mono
adapter in the system.

The second part is the WinBlank program itself, supplied in the
ARC file both in source form and as WinBlank.exe. You load or run
this program once each time you start Windows. I load it in my
WIN.INI file.

The (assembly time) options for BLANK.COM are these

timer -- set this to the number of seconds you want the timer
interval to be. It's presently set to 5 minutes.

ega -- set this to true if you have an ega, false if not.

mdacga -- set this to true if you have a mono or cga adapter.
Both the ega and mdacga options may be turned on.

winhook -- set this to true if you want the Windows interface with
the screen blanker to be enabled.


If you change any of these in the source, you will have to
reassemble the program. There is a makefile for this in the ARC --
execute "make blank" from dos.