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.