 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| To: | 999 (all members) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| From: | D6F (John Crane) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Subject: | 8BS CD ROM | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Having just read Martin Hodgson's article I thought I'd like to comment. Firstly a bit of background.I am a dedicated Acorn man.I have 3 Electrons (One 64K in use,a spare 64K and a basic one which I keep trying to sell on and off),An A3010 (Archimedes if you like) and a recent purchase a Risc PC.Interestingly perhaps,for a member of 8BS,I do not have,indeed I've never had a BBC computer of any description.I rely almost exclusively on either !65Host or !6502em Beeb emulators to read 8BS.Since switching to a Strongarm Risc PC I have to use !6502em as !65Host cannot be persuaded to work here.Incidentally I don't know what's different in 8BS 65 compared to 64,but !6502em doesn't like it.For a start it doesn't like a % sign for a directory name.Other items that call programs from other directories to enable them to run just end with "Not found at line ...." messages.Although this doesn:t affect !65Host.I went and fired up my A3010 to check. Anyway onto the CD I must admit I approached the purchase in a similar way to Martin and it never really occured to me that an Acorn based magazine would deal with "The other side" (i.e the dreaded PC).Anyway there was a PCBBC demo and I have a PC card on board so I thought I'd give it a go.Wait a minute I haven't got a BBC where do I get a Rom Image.I searched and found DFS on a disc I got from somewhere,but what about ADFS,these discs have more on don't they.I've got ADFS for the Elk but that won't work.Eventually I managed to find someone selling an ADFS Rom for the BBC B+ (the only version suitable),_3 changed hands and I was able to make an image and get started.Even then I found running the Disc images through Emulation to be somewhat troublesome.Menus wouldn't run properly in some cases and I got 1 or 2 "No Room" and other such messages. I tried ImageDFS and came across the same difficulties as Martin.I even approached WSS to ask about future development of this product for double sided images and ADFS support and I was told that they were unable to further develop the program as the program writer had left the company.However apparently a product called 'FilecoreFS' can help.Anyone know where I can get it !!! I would like to make a suggestion.Anybody got a new generation Acorn with a CD Writer.All that's then required is for all the 8BS issues to be archived with !Sparkfs or similar and written to CD Rom.A read only PD program such as Sparkplug can be provided with it to dearchive the contents and feed into a Beeb emulator.Alternatively someone could reconstitute the original discs using FDC,pack them up using !SparkFs and save everything to DOS Format discs.Send these to Chris and he could then create a directory called RiscOs,or Acorn with a textfile of instructions on the 8BSCD (space permitting).Infact I wouldn't mind having a go at this last option myself.If I can get FDC to work.At the moment the best I can manage is a DOS window called FDC with a flashing cursor in it.No C:> and no amount of typing produces any change on screen.I've even tried running native Type fdc and the old flashing cursor reappears and nothing works. Perhaps I've missed something obvious.Anyway thats about all for me for now. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| To: | 999 (all members) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| From: | K8G (Jonathan Harston) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Subject: | HADFS Version 5 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The majority of the changes from HADFS version 4 are minor big-fixes and corrections, but the following are the main changes: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date Compliance Confirmed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| All system code and programs have been examined for date compliance. HADFS itself has always been date-compliant, storing the year as a 7-bit offset from 1981. The interface between HADFS and the MOS has been written to ensure that the dates that HADFS is given are correct. The main concerns are with the year on the Master Compact wrapping round in 1996, and having to handle year 1999 wrap-round manually. The program | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| library in | Extras.ProgLib | and the | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| notes in the addendum detail the way to read the system data correctly. Another date-related problem was that asking for the date on a Master Compact could make a file-server call to read the date. This corrupted all sorts of memory and had to be accounted for. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| TreeCopy updated | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| TreeCopy will now correctly copy files to and from fileservers. Preciously, when reading from a fileserver, the file creation date was returned, now it uses the last update date. When writing to a fileserver, the standard OsFile call does not set the date field. A direct FileServer call has to be made. Note that on most fileservers you have to be logged on as a system user to be able to set file dates. If not, the file's Creation Date or Last Update Date will be left set to 'today'. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Command Line Passing | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The method for passing a command line to Basic programs has changed slightly. Rather than passing the line through the keyboard buffer, which has length and interuptency problems, the line is passed through the general string buffer. This was a program 'Prog' can be called with parameters 'One Two Three' with CHAIN "Prog One Two Three". Another advantage of this mathod is that the program can retrieve the pathname used to run the progranm, in the example above 'Prog'. *MCode has been updated to allow passing of parameters through the string buffer. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The new version of | FNOS#GetEnv | has | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| been updated as detailed in the | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| addendum notes and in | Extras.ProgLib. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The new version of HADFS is available from JGH PD and also from 8BS. Registered users will get a free update posted to them in the next few days. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||