4.Oct. 1998

Program name:
Automatic power up at time for Asus(tm) TX97-XE board V1.0 
by Christoph Hammer

Purpose:
This program allows you to set the automatic power up time on a Asus(tm)
TX97-XE board (and maybe other boards) with atx power supply, within
a Dos or Win95 environment.

Usage:
Just start from dosprompt by typing the name of the exe file or doubleclick
the exe file under windows.
Enter the alarm time or press 0 to disable alarm, 
then switch off or shutdown your computer and sleep until the system
will power up and boot again at the specified time.

Distribution status:
This program is Public domain and freely distributable!
Use at your own risk!

contact via email:
christoph.hammer@student.uni-tuebingen.de


Additional info:
If anyone has written a similar program I would be glad if he or she 
could send it to me for experience exchange, (source code would be
fine if its freeware ) 

The automatic power up at time function is implemented in the Asus(tm)
TX97-XE board with award bios and atx power supply. I guess this function
is (or should be) generally implemented in the atx advanced powermanagement
specification of any board.

The programm is tested only with the Asus(tm) TX97-XE board and atx power
supply, but may work with other atx boards too. I think you only have to
use another cmos adress instead of 4f and another bit in this adress to
make the program work on other boards. It also may be that many, especially
award bios boards uses always the same cmos registers.
But no warranty for that! 

The idea of this program is to use the computer as an alarm clock, which
boots in the morning and plays some wave or mp3 files to get awake.
So the implementation in the bios setup is not very smart, because I want
to enter the wakeup time very fast in the deep night seconds before I
shutdown the computer and I fell asleep, normally in this situation 
Iam very tired and do not have any motivation first to shutdown the
computer than reboot it,  enter the bios setup by pressing the del-key,
use arrow keys to get into the powermanagement setup, change values,
save the bios settings and shutdown again....

To do:
Well, the program does its simple job but its still not perfect.
Yet not implemented:
-command line parameter processing for batch files
-possibility to enter the wake up date (the function is implemented
 on the Asus TX97-XE but my program dos not use it yet).
-fast poweroff function (usefull under dos if the poweroff button
 is 3 meters away from keyboard)
-smart gui with more typical alarm clock functions
-win95 gui with some more features


Finally:
Well Iam not a C-programmer, the last time I programmed was 68K Assembler
on Amiga 500, so some of the source code may look not very sensefull for
you. I just added my lines to the hello world source in the borland
turbo c compiler. I want to read words and modify bytes so I have to 
watch for my types.

So this program is not more than a try, therefore I added the source code,
so if you dont like the source you may have a use for the cmos registers
used in it.

No bugreports needed (I hope)! But I would be very happy if someone could
send me the source code of the power off function which is used in the
only 800 bytes sized poweroff.exe for dos, program.

I know that many people have written power off and shutdown tools I would
be glad if some of them could send me the source code or parts of it, which
explain the used cmos registers and system calls.

-Does anybody know how to build a simple (simple means cheap) spdif  input
 (digital audio input) to get the songs from my DAT-recorder into my 
 computer?
-Does anybody know how to build a simple spdif  optical cable to coax cable
 converter?
-Does anybody know how to build a simple spdif  coax cable to optical cable
 converter?
-Are there any tries or plans to build a hardware mp3 decoder, connect it to
 a modified cdrom and use it as a car hifi stereo.

If you know please inform me at:
christoph.hammer@student.uni-tuebingen.de