Windows 10, AShell 6.4 (and 6.5)
Using INFLD and set the TIMER=nnn.
The box in the bottom right corner displays but it is empty; no value ticking down. However, the timer is working. It does tick down and time out.

Trying to help indentify when/where this started or is happening. I have an older laptop with Windows 7 and ashell 6.4.1547 and it is not displaying there. Windows 10 with 6.4 and 6.5 and not displaying. Windows 2012 R2 server and it is not displaying. But, Windows Server 2008 R2 it IS displaying fine.

I just tried this with a randomly selected program and it does appear to be working as expected (Windows 10, A-Shell 6.5.1556 & 6.4.1558.6). I suspect it is related to a specific TYPE code or combination therefore. (This program has |G|E#||K|_, but I also tried just #.)

Hit Control-\ when in the field to display all of the active TYPE codes and then we can maybe figure it out from there.

I will do what you indicate. However, I have the identical ashell version and application source code/software running on my Windows 10 laptop as is running on my customers windows 2008 R2 (Group Marketing Services). I run it on my laptop and no display. I run it on their server and it displays. Same program, same TYPE codes, color scheme etc etc.

INFLD Rev 7.0U [751]
Types: *]134569LVTWk2|_
xmax=8;8,Xmin=0,Pos=23,4

TIMER=30

It doesn't appear to be a TYPE code issue.

I wonder if it's a terminal driver issue, since the timer display is different depending on whether you have GUI support or not.

What does SET TERM show ...?

On my laptop where it does not display time.
Terminal driver: PCTDVG
Baud rate: 19200
Terminal width: 80
Terminal height: 24
Foreground color: 1
Background color: 2
Beveling: Auto
Sys bg color None
Win bg color None
Win text color None

On server 2008 R2 where it does display time:

Terminal driver: PCTDVG
Baud rate: 19200
Terminal width: 80
Terminal height: 24
Foreground color: 1
Background color: 2
Beveling: Program control
Sys bg color None
Win bg color None
Win text color None
)

I've played around with the Beveling options (which you can do from the Settings > Beveling menu), but I don't think it has any effect in the GUI environment, which you have (via PCTDVG) in both cases.

Does your timing out message look like this?



That's the GUI version, with the standard Windows font in a sunken static text control.

Maybe it would be worth trying to dump the GUI Control info while the timer was supposedly active; that might at least answer the question of whether the control exists (maybe off screen, or too small) vs. that it doesn't exist. To do that, Control-Shift-DoubleClick somewhere on the window and then click the Dump Control Info to Spreadsheet button. You should end up with an Excel document something like...

Via Emails back and forth Jack M and I were able to identify that by using the PCTDV vs PCTDVG driver it allows the timer to display. Per Jack M. the GUI driver must be interacting with some other setting or something not set that is not displaying the timer in the box.

While this resolves the timer display via the PCTDV driver other things are affected. EZVUE display is now totally text along with a few other things I had gotten used to via GUI.

Some day I will dig deeper and bring PCTDVG back up and see if I can resolve what causes the timer not to display.

Thanks Jack M. for the help.

I was afraid that might be the case. Using the "G" driver version (e.g. PCTDVG vs PCTDV on the Windows side, or AM75G vs AM75 etc on ATE) has many advantageous side-effects even for applications which are otherwise totally text-based.

So the idea of "downgrading" from PDTDVG to PCTDV just to work around an apparent-but-still-inexplicable display problem with the GUI version of the timer display was a convenient test, but probably not a good workaround. But now that we know that works, it begs the question of why not just use the text-mode timer display when INFLD is otherwise in text mode? (It's hard to imagine that anyone would complain about this, since it wasn't like the GUI timer display was that exciting; just different.)

So I've gone ahead and posted a beta 6.5.1657.1 which does just that, i.e. reverts to the old text-based timer display except for fields that use the |G code. If you want to try that, it's available here:

ash-6.5.1657.1-w32-upd.zip

Note that you may not want to upgrade a production system from 6.4 to 6.5 without some in-house testing, so I'm assuming you'd be testing this on your own machine. But if it solves the problem and you can't see any other undesirable side-effects, I might be inclined to make the same patch to the 6.4 version, which would then allow for a simple/low-risk updates. (Note that our standard recommendation is to always update to the latest within the stable release version, but for that reason we are extra conservative about making patches to it, and extra cautious about posting them. Hence this beta release procedure using the development version.)