Abstract: An alternate display content controller provides a technique for controlling a video display separately from and in addition to the content displayed on the operating system display surface. Where the display is a computer monitor, the alternate display content controller interacts with the computer utility operating system and hardware drivers to control allocation of display space and create and control one or more parallel graphical user interfaces in addition to the operating system desktop. An alternate display content controller may be incorporated in either hardware or software. As software, an alternate display content controller may be an application running on the computer operating system, or may include an operating system kernel of varying complexity ranging from dependent on the utility operating system for hardware system services to a parallel system independent of the utility operating system and capable of supporting dedicated applications.

Abstract: A method and apparatus which allows U.S. software applications which write directly to the video text RAM area to run in a purely graphics mode operating system environment such as Japanese mode of DOS/V. Memory management software includes an option which reserves main memory at system initialization for receiving the text RAM area in IBM PC compatible systems. A software driver periodically checks to determine if anything has changed in the text RAM area using the "dirty" bits associated with the page table entries in the 386 paging mechanism. If new data has been written to this area, the driver converts the ASCII data written to this area to graphics based characters which are then displayed onto the computer screen.

Abstract: A primarily oil-fueled engine is disclosed in which the engine compression ratio is established well below the level at which compression ignition of oil fuel will occur and in which the oil fuel charge is ignited by the discharge from a spark ignited, gas-fueled precombustion chamber. The compression ratio and peak firing pressures are similar to those encountered in a gas-fueled engine.