Force Drag Application (A5000 only)
by Nick Smith

In Acorn's new RISC OS 3 operating system, there is a small module in ROM called 'DragASprite' which, rather than doing outline drags from save boxes, actually drags the icon across the Desktop.

RISC OS 3 compliant applications (for instance, the ROM applications) provide sprite dragging if bit 1 of byte &1C in the CMOS RAM is set - however this feature is not documented in the A5000 manuals, and so should not be relied on in future versions of the operating system.

Unfortunately the facility to 'force' all applications to use this new feature is missing from the A5000 version of RISC OS 3.00 (25 Sep 1991), and so ForceADrag is a utility module that provides this to A5000 owners. Running the application makes file drags use sprites instead of outlines.

The module works by intercepting the normal Wimp_DragBox SWI calls from all RISC OS 2 and RISC OS 3 applications and converts it to the appropriate DragASprite_ SWI calls. Also provided is a command (*DropShadow ON|OFF) which gives an attractive shadow to dragged sprites when turned on. To use the module, just run the application from the Desktop, or *RMLoad the module from a boot sequence if you have one.

 RISC User 1992
