I did an article on it years ago, but don't have a copy handy.

Lingo.ini isn't quite as important as it once was.  In the old days, it was 
the opportunity to:

- Open certain XObjects (precursors of Xtras)
- Preset some global variables
- Keep the system from crashing
- Initialize the floating point mechanism

The general format of the file is more of a script than a .INI file.  It 
often has a handler called:

on startup
   -- Commands here
end

but in fact it'll do any handler there at all; the name of the handler 
doesn't matter.  It's always been called startup, but it could be "on moo" 
for all Director cares.  It may not even want a handler defined at all, I 
vaguely recall.

It used to have more relevance because it was an opportunity to set up some 
variables before startMovie was called (and startMovie was called 
displaying the stage, if I remember), but now you have prepareMovie, and 
lots of other things.

It is no longer necessary to pre-open XObjects, so that function is 
obsolete.  For instance, it used to pre-open FILEIO for everyone (which 
made problems for people that built projectors but didn't know about that 
and didn't include LINGO.INI and then FILEIO wouldn't work :)

The bug that had the program crash is gone.  It used to be that some 
systems, with a certain video card if I recall, would crash if the file was 
NOT present.  It didn't matter what was in Lingo.INI - it could be an empty 
file - it just had to be THERE or else things would crash.  That bug is 
gone now, so that purpose is obsolete.

A bug introduced in, I think, Director 5 or maybe 6 required the floating 
point mechanism to be initialized, so for a while LINGO.INI had a call to 
do something like "set a=0.0", which was enough to make it happy.

It is VERY limited in what you can put in it.  You can set up global 
variables in there (by default, all are global in there).  Most other 
things you cannot do.  You cannot call handlers in Director, you cannot 
call functions in Xtras, etc.  You can experiment, but you will find that 
most things won't work.

It is good to know about, that if your program is installed on your hard 
drive, and you want to create a mechanism to trigger hidden functions (that 
YOU put in), you could make a LINGO.INI to define, say, a debugging 
variable to be TRUE, and then do other things based on that, but generally 
it must be rigged up ahead of time.  It's not much of a security hole, 
because there's not a lot you can do from there.

But feel free to experiment.

- Tab


At 12:30 PM 11/16/01 +0000, limiar40 b wrote:
>hi list
>
>where i can find information on how use lingo.ini?
>tkx
>
>Limiar


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