What does this software do? I can't find anything about it online.

Thanks a lot for your reply! ^^

Speedy3 is ancient utility for the Victor 9000 (aka Sirius 1) and the IBM 5150.
It speeds up text output on CGA graphics systems. To do so, it patches the DOS kernal.
I believe it causes DOS to bypass the BIOS for displaying text.

Or to quote the author, Mr. Charles M. Dayton:
SPEEDY3 is designed to increase the display speed of MSDOS 2.x (and higher)
programs running on the Victor 9000 and the IBM PC. Not all programs will
increase in speed, only those that make use of MSDOS functions 2 (display
character), 6 (direct console I/O) and 9 (display string) will benefit.
SPEEDY3 requires no memory, it achieves the increased performance by
re-coding a section of MSDOS.

That comes in handy for programs that set a lot of text characters,
such as TUIs (textmode GUIs). Norton Commander, X-Tree or any program that uses scrolling text.

Speedy3 is (was) Public Domain and was bundled with some copies of PC-Ditto,
an ancient PC-Emulator for the Atari ST (which needed it badly)..

- I've attached a copy for you! :)

I think the best bet might be finding a way to contact Mr. Charles M Dayton and seeing if he might still have a copy of a newer version around somewhere. Nothing Google managed to index has a copy. Wouldn't shock me if there was an archived FTP site somewhere on the Internet Archive that could have a copy if it exists, but that would also be a long shot. Cursory examination suggests they don't have anything on it either.

Thank you for your explanation! It's very interesting that somebody managed to write their own text display routines to speed up DOS. Stuff like that takes some real talent.

Hi again, I'm glad you like it, too. ^^
A bit of research showed that the program was archived as speedy3.zip on a few shareware disks.

Your idea of contacting the author is good, I think.
I've found several persons of that name so far and will see if I find the right one.

I've also found a readme of PC-Ditto describing Speedy3.
The developers noticed an increase of speed of up to 30% (!):

SPEEDY3.EXE - A public domain program which may be useful from time- to -time to speedup
the screen display of some DOS versions; primarily DOS versions below 3.0.
Testing of this program has been limited. Therefore, try running it after you start your DOS and before you
run any applications. For many applications (e.g. dBase series), it does speed screen displays around 30 percent faster.
Other applications, such as Lotus 1-2-3, there appears to be no effect.
Because of the public domain nature of this program, it should be tested with your applications to determine
if it has any real value. Also, if you should encounter any flakyness using it, please let us know,
to date, we have not encountered any problems, but the possibly always exists with any product.

All it is is improved DOS screen output interrupt routines, nothing special. Nice to be able to add it to my library though 😀

I would be very surprised if it would even be needed by DOS 6.2x

debs3759 wrote:

All it is is improved DOS screen output interrupt routines, nothing special.
Nice to be able to add it to my library though 😀

Perhaps. On a V20-less PC clone *any* improvement is welcome, though. 😉
Btw, also have a look at Zeno. Just found that during my search.

debs3759 wrote:

I would be very surprised if it would even be needed by DOS 6.2x

I'm not sure how to word this, but it *feels* slower than PC-DOS 3.30 actually. 🙁
Scrolling on Norton Commander 1.x is quite laggy. On the 8088 PC, of course.

That's both quite nostalgic as well as annyoing at the same time.
(I tried to install a V20, two revisions actually, but the system BIOS is somewhat anti-V20.)

Personally, I originally wanted to use DOS 3.3 (and DOS Plus) for authencity, but then I faced reality.
Most of my programs are from the 90s, large and the original 20MB drive is very tiny.

So using DoubleSpace became necessary, which also improved disk performance a bit.
Second, DOS 6.x supports F5 and F8 during boot, so I can intercept if something goes wrong.

And last but not least, it supports -at least partially- the use of UMBs by the
help of an additional RAM card. So I'll be able to load some drivers "high" in the future.

Update. I tried Zeno, but it crashs my computer.

Now trying TheFast, an utility which improves BIOS code:

TheFast is a utility designed to do one thing; speed up the video
display. It has its roots from a program call Zeno, which
unfortunately does not work reliably on all computers. Thus came
this solution to the problem of speeding up the screen.

Edit: TheFast seems working (on DOS6).
It's working differently than Speedy3, though.

Update. I did a quick test with CheckIt (v4.1):

Without TheFast:
551 Characters/Second (BIOS)
4661 Characters/Second (CGA, direct)

With TheFast:
1103 Characters/Second (BIOS)
4661 Chracters/Second (CGA, direct)

According to the rating, BIOS drawing speed is now 1.63 times
the speed of the IBM PC-XT, as opposed to the previous 0.81 times.