First post, by justin1985
The little DOS tool SwapIRQ has been mentioned a few times on this forum, not least for getting PCI sound cards working in DOS when you don't have any BIOS control of IRQ allocations. My case is exactly the same as described in this thread: Problems with a YMF754 inside a Toshiba Tecra 8200 - a Toshiba Tectra 8200 with onboard Yamaha DS-XG sound which can be initialised with DOS drivers, but is apparently hard-wired to IRQ 11, which can't be used in many/any DOS games.
The SwapIRQ tool was clearly designed as shareware, and there is a two-stage nag process when running it ("Do you want to print a prepared order form? Y/N" as well as "This is a 30 day trial -please acknowledge"). It is archived in a few places online as versions 1.0 and 1.1, e.g. https://www.sac.sk/files.php?d=3&l=S and the ZIP includes details of how to pay etc.
It is a super useful tool for me, so clearly I would have been willing to pay! However, the developer seems long gone, and there is no trace of them for very many years indeed. So, I guess quite literally abandoned-ware?
So, does anyone know how it would have originally been activated when you could pay? Would you have got a floppy in the mail with a replacement executable? Or would there have been some kind of activation code or hidden command line switch or something that you would have been told about, to stop the nag messages when running it? And obviously, can anyone help with archived copies of whatever the purchased version was?
Or maybe there is some other free or non-nagging tool that can accomplish swapping/re-routing IRQs under DOS?