From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 13:39:19 1999 Message-ID: <9EbynBAlA2e3EwzU@wholehog.demon.co.uk> Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 13:33:41 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a In-Reply-To: <007101bec16b$28802220$6b51c29e@inf.upol.cz> MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 569 Lines: 13 Aley Keprt wrote _with more than 80 columns per line:_ >Sam-snapshot (whole memory+cpu+audio & video state) is planned, but >haven't realised yet, since we must discuss the fileformat at first. (I >don't want to make my own standards as Si does.) Maybe we could use >something like Z80 fileformat used on ZXS (it has internal compression >- very necessary for Sam). Good compression is something that you really need on the SAM, so that's why I *really* don't think you should use Z80's method. You'd get better compression from something like zlib. -- Stuart Brady From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 13:52:20 1999 Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 13:45:31 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Collier X-Sender: asc25@orange.csi.cam.ac.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a In-Reply-To: <9EbynBAlA2e3EwzU@wholehog.demon.co.uk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1036 Lines: 26 On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Stuart Brady wrote: > Aley Keprt wrote _with more than 80 columns per line:_ > > >Sam-snapshot (whole memory+cpu+audio & video state) is planned, but > >haven't realised yet, since we must discuss the fileformat at first. Two months ago, you were saying people should be careful about piracy, ie not allowing image files of protected disks to be made. Which I think is probably a sensible idea... But don't you think that memory-snapshots will also encourage piracy or illegal copying? > Good compression is something that you really need on the SAM, so that's > why I *really* don't think you should use Z80's method. You'd get better > compression from something like zlib. Personally I don't see anything wrong with the currect tactic of saving .dsk images and gzipping them. -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 14:03:18 1999 X-sendmail-revision: 29-Mar-1999 (23) by ant@tissoft.co.uk Message-ID: <006901bec3c1$d97069c0$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> From: "Nick Humphries" To: Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 14:01:34 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO X-Status: A Content-Length: 530 Lines: 20 From: Andrew Collier >On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Stuart Brady wrote: >> Good compression is something that you really need on the SAM, so that's >> why I *really* don't think you should use Z80's method. You'd get better >> compression from something like zlib. > >Personally I don't see anything wrong with the currect tactic of saving >.dsk images and gzipping them. PCs don't have gzip by default. What's wrong with writing a custom compression routine which is portable between the various platforms? Nick From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 14:10:22 1999 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 14:04:13 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 700 Lines: 17 In message , Andrew Collier writes >On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Stuart Brady wrote: >> Good compression is something that you really need on the SAM, so that's >> why I *really* don't think you should use Z80's method. You'd get better >> compression from something like zlib. >Personally I don't see anything wrong with the currect tactic of saving >.dsk images and gzipping them. Snapshots could be useful sometimes... but most of the time, people will use dsk or sad images, in the same way that spectrum users tend to use tap and tzx files. It would let people play certain games using simcoupe, too. -- Stuart Brady From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 14:30:22 1999 Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 14:21:23 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Collier X-Sender: asc25@orange.csi.cam.ac.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a In-Reply-To: <006901bec3c1$d97069c0$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 894 Lines: 24 On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Nick Humphries wrote: > From: Andrew Collier > >Personally I don't see anything wrong with the currect tactic of saving > >.dsk images and gzipping them. > > PCs don't have gzip by default. What's wrong with writing a custom compression > routine which is portable between the various platforms? PCs don't have sim-coupe by default. Your point? I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find a PC owner who couldn't decode - or encode, for that matter - a .gz file. There's little point to reinventing the wheel, and you'd need to work quite hard to make your customized compression algorithm work better than gzip anyway. Andrew -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 14:30:22 1999 Subject: spec 128 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 14:23:45 +0100 (BST) In-Reply-To: from "Stuart Brady" at Jul 1, 99 02:04:13 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: From: Andrew Gale X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 542 Lines: 16 I know this isn't sam related, but I guess that one of you might be able to help..... On the spec 48K, as I understand it, access to the lower 16K is restricted to let the ULA get to it, and the upper 32K runs at full speed. Fine - there are different banks fo chips for the 16K and 32K. Now, on the 128, I assume there is only 1 bank of chips. So, is the upper 32K (when in 48K mode) still running at full speed, or are there occasional wait states for video access? Or, is the screen RAM held in a different bank of chips? Thanks, Andy From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 14:46:42 1999 Subject: Re: spec 128 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 14:41:20 +0100 (BST) In-Reply-To: from "Andrew Gale" at Jul 1, 99 02:23:45 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: From: Andrew Gale X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO X-Status: A Content-Length: 436 Lines: 9 > Now, on the 128, I assume there is only 1 bank of chips. So, is > the upper 32K (when in 48K mode) still running at full speed, or > are there occasional wait states for video access? Or, is the > screen RAM held in a different bank of chips? > Actually, checking the FAQ, I see that there are two 16K banks that are contended, and the other 6 aren't. How, then, is this possible with only one set of memory chips? Or are there two? From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 14:46:42 1999 X-sendmail-revision: 29-Mar-1999 (23) by ant@tissoft.co.uk Message-ID: <007601bec3c8$07fd5130$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> From: "Nick Humphries" To: Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 14:45:50 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1497 Lines: 43 From: Andrew Collier >On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Nick Humphries wrote: > >> From: Andrew Collier >> >Personally I don't see anything wrong with the currect tactic of saving >> >.dsk images and gzipping them. >> >> PCs don't have gzip by default. What's wrong with writing a custom compression >> routine which is portable between the various platforms? > >PCs don't have sim-coupe by default. Your point? Well, you could make installation a hell of a lot easier by not asking the user to find and install various external programs before you can get SimCoupe running. It's bad enough that you have to find, download and install the sound chip driver. IMHO everything should be in a single install set, and ideally as a single program. >I'd say you'd be hard >pressed to find a PC owner who couldn't decode - or encode, for that >matter - a .gz file. I disagree. It depends who you aim the emulator at. If you're going for your regular emulation fan, then most of them would only recognise .ZIP files or self-extracting EXEs. Any other type of compression (gzip, lha, arc, whatever) would require a more techie type of person who'd know about these less common (in PC-land) compressors. >There's little point to reinventing the wheel, and you'd need to work >quite hard to make your customized compression algorithm work better than >gzip anyway. Who says it has to be better than gzip? It just needs to be better than having raw DSK files. Nick Humphries. From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 15:02:00 1999 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a References: <007601bec3c8$07fd5130$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> X-Face: "J~~0'L`GfL^sW4%+i35x#X308)K/$7\]qy)UZ$`k:}Bx]6mgAA^N5,@brn/19TPn%o;j28 W7mD)UN~se8P9\3?wU.g+i9)X Date: 01 Jul 1999 14:58:34 +0100 In-Reply-To: "Nick Humphries"'s message of "Thu, 1 Jul 1999 14:45:50 +0100" Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.070089 (Pterodactyl Gnus v0.89) Emacs/20.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO X-Status: A Content-Length: 2444 Lines: 53 "Nick Humphries" writes: > > > PCs don't have gzip by default. What's wrong with writing a custom > > > compression > > > routine which is portable between the various platforms? > > > >PCs don't have sim-coupe by default. Your point? > > Well, you could make installation a hell of a lot easier by not asking the user > to find and install various external programs before you can get SimCoupe > running. It's bad enough that you have to find, download and install the sound > chip driver. IMHO everything should be in a single install set, and ideally as a > single program. This is a classic OSS problem. You aren't a paying customer therefore if you feel strongly about getting it changed your views don't necessarily count. However you are free to contribute if you are able. For example, I'd imagine that whoever is packaging up SimCoupe these days feels that he's done enough work writing the damn thing without writing a cross-platform compression routine as well. Which is harder? You getting a separate package or someone writing a compression program that could be distributed with SimCoupe? You could always write one and I'm sure it'd be considered ... > > I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find a PC owner who couldn't > > decode - or encode, for that matter - a .gz file. > > I disagree. It depends who you aim the emulator at. If you're going for your > regular emulation fan, then most of them would only recognise .ZIP files or > self-extracting EXEs. Any other type of compression (gzip, lha, arc, whatever) > would require a more techie type of person who'd know about these less common > (in PC-land) compressors. I deal with a lot of Windows based freaks users ;) and 90% of them can handle a .gz if you tell them 'You have to unzip it' Failing that as long as there are clear instructions as for what they have to do 'ie get program x form site y. Install. run file.gz through program x' they're perfectly capable of doing it. > >There's little point to reinventing the wheel, and you'd need to work > >quite hard to make your customized compression algorithm work better than > >gzip anyway. > > Who says it has to be better than gzip? It just needs to be better than having > raw DSK files. Let me guess ... you don't pay for your bandwidth right? Lee. -- I was doing object-oriented assembly at 1 year old ... For some reason my mom insists on calling it "Playing with blocks" From imc@comlab.ox.ac.uk Thu Jul 1 15:03:10 1999 Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 15:03:10 +0100 From: Ian Collier To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: spec 128 Message-ID: <19990701150310.C19206@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mail-Followup-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.1i In-Reply-To: ; from Andrew Gale on Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 02:41:20PM +0100 Status: RO Content-Length: 483 Lines: 11 On Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 02:41:20PM +0100, Andrew Gale wrote: > Actually, checking the FAQ, I see that there are two 16K banks > that are contended, and the other 6 aren't. How, then, is this > possible with only one set of memory chips? Or are there two? I haven't checked the FAQ but on the +3 it's 4 and 4 and I'd be surprised if the other 128K models were different. I don't know how the hardware is arranged but this would seem to indicate that it's in two blocks of 64K. imc From imc@comlab.ox.ac.uk Thu Jul 1 15:05:28 1999 Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 15:05:28 +0100 From: Ian Collier To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Message-ID: <19990701150528.D19206@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mail-Followup-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no References: <006901bec3c1$d97069c0$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.1i In-Reply-To: <006901bec3c1$d97069c0$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk>; from Nick Humphries on Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 02:01:34PM +0100 Status: RO Content-Length: 494 Lines: 11 On Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 02:01:34PM +0100, Nick Humphries wrote: > PCs don't have gzip by default. What's wrong with writing a custom compression > routine which is portable between the various platforms? Er, PCs don't have that custom compression routine by default either. Anyway, you could use zip instead of gzip as they are rather similar formats when only one file is involved. (You can even make a single-file zip and call it foo.gz, and gunzip won't even notice the difference.) imc From imc@comlab.ox.ac.uk Thu Jul 1 15:08:19 1999 Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 15:08:19 +0100 From: Ian Collier To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Message-ID: <19990701150819.E19206@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mail-Followup-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no References: <007601bec3c8$07fd5130$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.1i In-Reply-To: ; from Lee Willis on Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 02:58:34PM +0100 Status: RO Content-Length: 284 Lines: 8 On Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 02:58:34PM +0100, Lee Willis wrote: > I deal with a lot of Windows based freaks=08=08=08=08=08=08 users ;) and = 90% ^^^^^^ When you do this as a joke you are supposed to write '^H', not put them in literally... imc From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 15:17:33 1999 X-Authentication-Warning: pc203.cambridge.arm.com: askillma owned process doing -bs Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 15:16:21 +0100 (GMT) From: Allan Skillman To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a In-Reply-To: <007601bec3c8$07fd5130$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 862 Lines: 21 Hi All, The easiest way to provide gnuzip compression without the need for an external compressing agent is to link the program against the zlib library, and use its file i/o api. This will automatically generate gzipped disk images on the fly. This was one of the enhancements I was going to do to SimCoupe if I ever (or do ever) get some time off between writing ARM CPU models. regards Allan +------------------------------+-------------------------------------------+ | Allan Skillman | "There are five flavours of resons, the | | EDA Group | elementary particles of magic : up, down, | | ARM | sideways, sex-appeal and peppermint." | | allan.skillman@arm.com | - Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies) | +------------------------------+-------------------------------------------+ From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 15:28:11 1999 Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 15:17:10 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Collier X-Sender: asc25@orange.csi.cam.ac.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a In-Reply-To: <007601bec3c8$07fd5130$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1383 Lines: 37 On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Nick Humphries wrote: > From: Andrew Collier > >I'd say you'd be hard > >pressed to find a PC owner who couldn't decode - or encode, for that > >matter - a .gz file. > > I disagree. Fine. But as far as I'm concerned, the point still stands. I hardly know anyone who uses a PC at all and doesn't have a program capable of ungzipping, and who wouldn't be afraid to use it. After all, SimCoupe is zipped itself. If you've managed to uncompress that, then the chances are that the same uncompress program can also handle gzip files. Gzip is *way* more common than lha and arc which you mentioned. > >There's little point to reinventing the wheel, and you'd need to work > >quite hard to make your customized compression algorithm work better than > >gzip anyway. > > Who says it has to be better than gzip? It just needs to be better than having > raw DSK files. No, it has to better than the existing solution if you're going to persuade a programmer to spend his time on writing the darned thing. In other words, it has got to be better than a gzipped .dsk file which is what everybody currently uses. Andrew -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 15:41:19 1999 X-sendmail-revision: 29-Mar-1999 (23) by ant@tissoft.co.uk Message-ID: <00a801bec3cc$b0b68950$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> From: "Nick Humphries" To: Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 15:19:11 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1384 Lines: 41 From: Lee Willis >"Nick Humphries" writes: > >> > > PCs don't have gzip by default. What's wrong with writing a custom >> > > compression >> > > routine which is portable between the various platforms? >> > >> >PCs don't have sim-coupe by default. Your point? >> >> Well, you could make installation a hell of a lot easier by not asking the user >> to find and install various external programs before you can get SimCoupe >> running. It's bad enough that you have to find, download and install the sound >> chip driver. IMHO everything should be in a single install set, and ideally as a >> single program. > >This is a classic OSS problem. You aren't a paying customer therefore if >you feel strongly about getting it changed your views don't necessarily >count. I know all about the problems involved in trying to please the non-paying punter. However, I was just making a suggestion that I feel would be an improvement to the compression feature as it's at a design stage. >> Who says it has to be better than gzip? It just needs to be better than having >> raw DSK files. > >Let me guess ... you don't pay for your bandwidth right? Actually, I do. At worst, the difference between a gzipped DSK file and a custom-compressed zipfile should only be in the order of 10s of K. That's only an extra few seconds of download time. Nick From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 15:41:20 1999 X-sendmail-revision: 29-Mar-1999 (23) by ant@tissoft.co.uk Message-ID: <00a301bec3cc$316acc60$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> From: "Nick Humphries" To: Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 15:15:38 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 552 Lines: 17 From: Allan Skillman >Hi All, > >The easiest way to provide gnuzip compression without the need for an >external compressing agent is to link the program against the zlib >library, and use its file i/o api. This will automatically generate >gzipped disk images on the fly. Fair enough. Reminds me of when I was using a zip library a few years ago (Greenleaf?). It's a lot neater to have compression/uncompression withing the code itself rather than doing a system() or whatever to an external program. Nick Humphries From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 15:41:20 1999 Subject: Re: spec 128 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 15:29:46 +0100 (BST) In-Reply-To: <19990701150310.C19206@comlab.ox.ac.uk> from "Ian Collier" at Jul 1, 99 03:03:11 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: From: Andrew Gale X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO X-Status: A Content-Length: 392 Lines: 9 > I haven't checked the FAQ but on the +3 it's 4 and 4 and I'd be > surprised if the other 128K models were different. I don't know > how the hardware is arranged but this would seem to indicate > that it's in two blocks of 64K. > If there are four chips, then 2 banks of 64K seems likely. But in that case, I'd expect four 16K banks to be contended, not two.... hmmm... the plot thickens! From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 15:41:21 1999 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 14:59:06 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a In-Reply-To: <006901bec3c1$d97069c0$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 840 Lines: 22 Nick Humphries wrote: >PCs don't have gzip by default. PCs? You mean *WINDOWS*, don't you? If you buy a Lintel box, you *do* get gzip, along with zip. Windows doesn't come with any real compression tools -- You can't even use *cabs* properly. How MS can consider a web browser an "essential" part of the OS and fail to write a zip program... >What's wrong with writing a custom compression >routine which is portable between the various platforms? What??? IIRC, gzip has been ported to most OSs, and gz is even supported by WinZip. Zlib also works on a wide range of platforms, which makes gz support *really* easy to write. I get the feeling that gzip-style compression *might* just be the most commonly used method, somehow. It's also supposed to be really easy to use. Ever used pk or winzip? Hmm... -- Stuart Brady From imc@comlab.ox.ac.uk Thu Jul 1 15:48:22 1999 Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 15:48:22 +0100 From: Ian Collier To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: spec 128 Message-ID: <19990701154821.H19206@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mail-Followup-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no References: <19990701150310.C19206@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.1i In-Reply-To: ; from Andrew Gale on Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 03:29:46PM +0100 Status: RO Content-Length: 365 Lines: 9 On Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 03:29:46PM +0100, Andrew Gale wrote: > If there are four chips, then 2 banks of 64K seems likely. But in that > case, I'd expect four 16K banks to be contended, not two.... hmmm... > the plot thickens! In case it wasn't clear from my other mail, four 16K banks *are* contended on the +3 (but I don't have an other 128K model to test). imc From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 16:11:08 1999 Message-ID: <0AEF0EB21F09D211AE4E0080C82733BF851B43@mailhost.aculab.com> From: Justin Skists To: "'sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no'" Subject: RE: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 15:25:59 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2232.9) Content-Type: text/plain X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1139 Lines: 35 Wow.. An ARM CPU model on the SAM? :) > -----Original Message----- > From: Allan Skillman [SMTP:askillma@cambridge.arm.com] > Sent: Thursday, July 01, 1999 3:16 PM > To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no > Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a > > Hi All, > > The easiest way to provide gnuzip compression without the need for an > external compressing agent is to link the program against the zlib > library, and use its file i/o api. This will automatically generate > gzipped disk images on the fly. > > This was one of the enhancements I was going to do to SimCoupe if > I ever (or do ever) get some time off between writing ARM CPU > models. > > regards > > Allan > > +------------------------------+------------------------------------------ > -+ > | Allan Skillman | "There are five flavours of resons, the > | > | EDA Group | elementary particles of magic : up, down, > | > | ARM | sideways, sex-appeal and peppermint." > | > | allan.skillman@arm.com | - Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies) > | > +------------------------------+------------------------------------------ > -+ From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 16:27:44 1999 Subject: Re: spec 128 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 16:18:42 +0100 (BST) In-Reply-To: <19990701154821.H19206@comlab.ox.ac.uk> from "Ian Collier" at Jul 1, 99 03:48:22 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: From: Andrew Gale X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 817 Lines: 21 > In case it wasn't clear from my other mail, four 16K banks *are* contended on > the +3 (but I don't have an other 128K model to test). > That would make sense - thanks. (I looked in the FAQ and it said the screen memory and the shadow screen memory were contended, so I assumed they were the only two, but obviously that's not the case). The whole reason I'm asking is 'cos I'm messing about trying to make a spectrum out of TTL chips, and I was a bit worried about getting the timings right, but I'm not sure how much it matters... after all, the SAM's timings are totally different to the spectrum, but most spectrum stuff seems to run fine. I've never been a speccy user, so I don't run any spectrum stuff on my SAM - are there many games that don't like the altered timings? Thanks for your help, Ian. Andy From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 16:27:44 1999 X-sendmail-revision: 29-Mar-1999 (23) by ant@tissoft.co.uk Message-ID: <00fe01bec3d5$bd8e9100$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> From: "Nick Humphries" To: Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 16:23:58 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 889 Lines: 31 -----Original Message----- From: Stuart Brady To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Thursday, July 01, 1999 3:45 PM Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a >Nick Humphries wrote: > >>PCs don't have gzip by default. > >PCs? You mean *WINDOWS*, don't you? Yes, which is a pretty important piece of information if you're developing for Windows... And, as a Windows user, I'd like to say that when downloading software, most of it has been in pkzip/winzip files (*.zip) rather than gzip files (*.gz). Not as it is on Linux, I know, but another pretty important piece of information when you're developing for Windows. Anyway, all this is moot since, as Allan pointed out, using the zlib library eliminates the need for the user to somehow find a copy of gzip. So my solution was a good one after all... Nick From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 16:50:54 1999 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 16:45:05 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a In-Reply-To: <007601bec3c8$07fd5130$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1886 Lines: 40 Nick Humphries wrote: >Well, you could make installation a hell of a lot easier by not asking >the user to find and install various external programs before you can >get SimCoupe running. It's bad enough that you have to find, download >and install the sound chip driver. IMHO everything should be in a >single install set, and ideally as a single program. You can read gz files with zlib if you want to do it internally -- it's sort of what it's for, really... >I disagree. It depends who you aim the emulator at. If you're going for your >regular emulation fan, then most of them would only recognise .ZIP files or >self-extracting EXEs. Any other type of compression (gzip, lha, arc, whatever) >would require a more techie type of person who'd know about these less common >(in PC-land) compressors. WinZip can handle gz files, and I think Zip Magic can, too. Right-click and choose the extract option... hardly rocket science, is it? Zlib can be used on Win32, DOS, a lot of UNIX systems, and probablly MacOS. I *really* hope you're not thinking of placing sam disks in *DOS* executables... that's just completely insane. Btw, you're mixing PC and DOS up -- DOS is an OPERATING SYSTEM. PC is a PERSONAL COMPUTER. Got that? Also, I *really* hate to have to point this out, but zip's method is the *same* as gzip's... The difference is that gzip compresses a single file, which is all you need. Zip files would have the complication of extracting the dsk or sad file from the archive. If there's more than one file, which one do you use? Gzip is better for single files. End of story. Please try to read some documentation on the subject. >Who says it has to be better than gzip? It just needs to be better than having >raw DSK files. What's wrong with zlib? Why the hell would people want to write something new when gz is better and is easier to implement? -- Stuart Brady From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 17:25:26 1999 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 17:23:26 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a In-Reply-To: <00fe01bec3d5$bd8e9100$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1071 Lines: 23 Nick Humphries wrote: >And, as a Windows user, I'd like to say that when downloading software, most of >it has been in pkzip/winzip files (*.zip) rather than gzip files (*.gz). Not as >it is on Linux, I know, but another pretty important piece of information when >you're developing for Windows. There's no reason why Windows users can't use tar.gz -- I'm sure that if someone distributed some software in it, people would still be able to use it. Of course, there's no reason why Windows users shouldn't use zip, too. They've always used zip in the past, and they see no reason to change. Gzip *is* better for single files, though - simply because it can *only* contain one file. >Anyway, all this is moot since, as Allan pointed out, using the zlib library >eliminates the need for the user to somehow find a copy of gzip. So my solution >was a good one after all... I thought you wanted to write something new? Anyway, nobody ever suggested that using the gzip executable was the best way of doing it. Gzip files can be read using zlib, you know. -- Stuart Brady From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 17:39:20 1999 Message-ID: <0AEF0EB21F09D211AE4E0080C82733BF851B44@mailhost.aculab.com> From: Justin Skists To: "'sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no'" Subject: RE: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 17:35:16 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2232.9) Content-Type: text/plain X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO X-Status: A Content-Length: 369 Lines: 13 >zip, too. They've always used zip in the past, and they see no reason to >change. Gzip *is* better for single files, though - simply because it >can *only* contain one file. Hell.. Why not use a tar + gzip combination? :) Relax - After all, WW3 supposed to start any day now and last for 27 years... (Bugger, I've been reading too much about Nostradamus) Justin. From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 17:39:21 1999 X-sendmail-revision: 29-Mar-1999 (23) by ant@tissoft.co.uk Message-ID: <013d01bec3de$48fdef30$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> From: "Nick Humphries" To: Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 17:25:08 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1208 Lines: 25 From: Stuart Brady >What's wrong with zlib? Why the hell would people want to write >something new when gz is better and is easier to implement? Of course, the original poster was advocating gzipping DSK files, which I took to mean doing that either via the command line, or by a system() call (or exec() or whatever) to the external program. No one mentioned zlib at that point which was why I advocated having a compression method within the program itself. At the time I didn't know about zlib, having only worked with compression libraries you had to pay for. As it turned out, I wasn't being unreasonable at all about asking for fewer exteral programs for SimCoupe to be reliant on. Nick Humphries. PS. It might be an idea if you read all the messages in a thread before you respond, and that you take time to understand where I'm coming from. PPS. Don't you ever get tired of needlessly pointing out the obvious and talking down to me? And for goodness sake stop being pedantic about my usage of the term PC. You knew what I meant. I knew what I meant. Everyone knew what I meant. Or did you not know that there's also a DOS and Windows version of SimCoupe? *sigh* From imc@comlab.ox.ac.uk Thu Jul 1 17:44:21 1999 Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 17:44:21 +0100 From: Ian Collier To: "'sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no'" Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Message-ID: <19990701174421.I19206@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mail-Followup-To: "'sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no'" References: <0AEF0EB21F09D211AE4E0080C82733BF851B44@mailhost.aculab.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.1i In-Reply-To: <0AEF0EB21F09D211AE4E0080C82733BF851B44@mailhost.aculab.com>; from Justin Skists on Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 05:35:16PM +0100 Status: RO Content-Length: 426 Lines: 12 On Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 05:35:16PM +0100, Justin Skists wrote: > Relax - After all, WW3 supposed to start any day now and last for 27 > years... > (Bugger, I've been reading too much about Nostradamus) WW3? I thought it was just the end of the world on July 4th. Of course, on uk.media there is someone claiming that the earth will be wiped out by a comet which will first become visible during the eclipse in August. imc From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 19:13:35 1999 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 19:08:27 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a In-Reply-To: <013d01bec3de$48fdef30$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1882 Lines: 40 >Of course, the original poster was advocating gzipping DSK files, which I took >to mean doing that either via the command line, or by a system() call (or >exec() >or whatever) to the external program. No one mentioned zlib at that point which >was why I advocated having a compression method within the program itself. Ah... sorry. My posting said that it would be better to use zlib. I didn't actually bother to explain what it was though. :-( I sort of assumed that you knew as much as me, and that the idea of modifying code from gzip or using zlib would be obvious... I thought that you were against using gz files because you were suggesting writing something completely new, even after I had mentioned zlib. >At the time I didn't know about zlib, having only worked with >compression libraries you had to pay for. As it turned out, I wasn't >being unreasonable at all about asking for fewer exteral programs for >SimCoupe to be reliant on. There's nothing wrong with wanting that, but I don't remember saying that there was. I just assumed that you'd have typed zlib and gzip into a search engine, though... >PS. It might be an idea if you read all the messages in a thread before you >respond, and that you take time to understand where I'm coming from. Maybe you'd like to read some documentation before dismissing ideas. You seemed to be suggesting that no windows programs could read gz... Maybe if you say "I think..." you'll get a nicer response. :-) >PPS. Don't you ever get tired of needlessly pointing out the obvious and >talking >down to me? And for goodness sake stop being pedantic about my usage of the >term >PC. You knew what I meant. I knew what I meant. Everyone knew what I meant. Or >did you not know that there's also a DOS and Windows version of SimCoupe? Ok -- point taken... You are taking it a bit too seriously, though. -- Stuart Brady From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 21:47:21 1999 From: "Robert van der Veeke" To: Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 22:42:26 +0200 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: Microsoft Internet Mail 4.70.1157 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <19990701204422.30C103AED@maillist.kabelfoon.nl> X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1305 Lines: 33 > Van: Ian Collier > Aan: 'sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no' > Onderwerp: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a > Datum: donderdag, juli 01, 1999 6:44 > > On Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 05:35:16PM +0100, Justin Skists wrote: > > Relax - After all, WW3 supposed to start any day now and last for 27 > > years... > > > (Bugger, I've been reading too much about Nostradamus) > > WW3? I thought it was just the end of the world on July 4th. > Of course, on uk.media there is someone claiming that the earth > will be wiped out by a comet which will first become visible > during the eclipse in August. oh yes "A great fire from the sky", and the king of mongools would rise again. The head of the Pakinstani nuclear weapons programs goes by the name of Khan and claims to be a descendant from Dhengiz Khan. And the new city that is destroyed by fire could Novi Sad as well wich happens to mean "New city or New garden", and we all know what those people got on their heads the past months. Spooky stuff i must say :), but it could be sept(ember) before shit happens -- Robert van der Veeke, aka RJV Graphics [rjvveeke@caiw.nl] Currently listening to : Rurouni Kenshin - Brilliant collection - Char's Gelgoog was using a double-bladed beam saber nearly 20 years before Darth Maul came down the pike! From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 22:21:11 1999 Message-ID: <004701bda52d$51fba6c0$9c5008c3@persona> From: "David L" To: Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 21:17:48 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.1 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1705 Lines: 47 Of course the whole calender is complete shite... about 5-20 years out of synch depending on who you believe....! Off topic: Why does the local Catholic church think 2000 -1 = 2000? -----Original Message----- From: Robert van der Veeke To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: 01 July 1999 21:49 Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a >> Van: Ian Collier >> Aan: 'sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no' >> Onderwerp: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a >> Datum: donderdag, juli 01, 1999 6:44 >> >> On Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 05:35:16PM +0100, Justin Skists wrote: >> > Relax - After all, WW3 supposed to start any day now and last for 27 >> > years... >> >> > (Bugger, I've been reading too much about Nostradamus) >> >> WW3? I thought it was just the end of the world on July 4th. >> Of course, on uk.media there is someone claiming that the earth >> will be wiped out by a comet which will first become visible >> during the eclipse in August. > >oh yes "A great fire from the sky", and the king of mongools would rise >again. The head of the Pakinstani nuclear weapons programs goes by the name >of Khan and claims to be a descendant from Dhengiz Khan. > >And the new city that is destroyed by fire could Novi Sad as well wich >happens to mean "New city or New garden", and we all know what those people >got on their heads the past months. > >Spooky stuff i must say :), but it could be sept(ember) before shit happens > >-- >Robert van der Veeke, aka RJV Graphics >[rjvveeke@caiw.nl] >Currently listening to : Rurouni Kenshin - Brilliant collection - > >Char's Gelgoog was using a double-bladed beam saber >nearly 20 years before Darth Maul came down the pike! > > From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 22:47:31 1999 Message-ID: <377BE171.E738A567@bonbon.net> Date: Thu, 01 Jul 1999 22:45:21 +0100 From: Martin Fitzpatrick X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.61 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en-GB,en,en-US MIME-Version: 1.0 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a References: <004701bda52d$51fba6c0$9c5008c3@persona> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 331 Lines: 17 David L wrote: > > Of course the whole calender is complete shite... about 5-20 years out of > synch depending on who you believe....! > > Off topic: Why does the local Catholic church think 2000 -1 = 2000? Is it a joke or a serious question? Martin -- Email: poohsticks@bonbon.net ICQ#: 11077801 AOL/CServeIM: Flupert From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 23:09:45 1999 From: "Robert van der Veeke" To: Subject: The end of times and other silly stuff (was Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a) Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 00:04:13 +0200 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: Microsoft Internet Mail 4.70.1157 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <19990701220610.9C7EB3AE0@maillist.kabelfoon.nl> X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 998 Lines: 27 > Van: David L > Aan: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no > Onderwerp: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a > Datum: woensdag, juli 01, 1998 10:17 > > Of course the whole calender is complete shite... about 5-20 years out of > synch depending on who you believe....! mmmh 15 years back in time, I could be young again, yesss young bwahahahahaaaa (oh shutup, your only turning 35 this year :Ed) > Off topic: Why does the local Catholic church think 2000 -1 = 2000? It should be actually 2004 i guess, but who cares, we are going to party big time in 185 days time. Completely off topic now: How far are they with the "London Eye" Millenium Ferris wheel? Because my dad is working on that project and i hope he makes it back to the Netherlands next friday. -- Robert van der Veeke, aka RJV Graphics [rjvveeke@caiw.nl] Currently listening to : Rurouni Kenshin - Brilliant collection - Char's Gelgoog was using a double-bladed beam saber nearly 20 years before Darth Maul came down the pike! From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 23:29:36 1999 Message-ID: <377BEB79.45BD9F51@bonbon.net> Date: Thu, 01 Jul 1999 23:28:09 +0100 From: Martin Fitzpatrick X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.61 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en-GB,en,en-US MIME-Version: 1.0 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a References: <006901bec3c1$d97069c0$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> <19990701150528.D19206@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 608 Lines: 21 Ian Collier wrote: > > On Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 02:01:34PM +0100, Nick Humphries wrote: > > PCs don't have gzip by default. What's wrong with writing a custom compression > > routine which is portable between the various platforms? > > Er, PCs don't have that custom compression routine by default either. I think the point is that the custom compression would be built into the main Sim-Coupe program, so whenever you open up a compressed DSK file, its automatically decompressed on the fly... So the user doesn't even know Martin -- Email: poohsticks@bonbon.net ICQ#: 11077801 AOL/CServeIM: Flupert From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 1 23:38:25 1999 Subject: Re: The end of times and other silly stuff (was Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a) To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 23:36:13 +0100 (BST) In-Reply-To: <19990701220610.9C7EB3AE0@maillist.kabelfoon.nl> from "Robert van der Veeke" at Jul 2, 99 00:04:13 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: From: Andrew Gale X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 443 Lines: 9 > Completely off topic now: How far are they with the "London Eye" Millenium > Ferris wheel? Because my dad is working on that project and i hope he makes > it back to the Netherlands next friday. > They're still going ahead with that then, are they? (I guess so) Isn't is wave powered and going to take ten minutes or so to do a complete circle? It might be nice looking out over the london skyline for a second or two.... but ten minutes?! From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Fri Jul 2 00:18:49 1999 X-Authentication-Warning: stone.dcs.warwick.ac.uk: csuan owned process doing -bs Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 00:14:44 +0100 (BST) From: Paul Walker To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a In-Reply-To: <006901bec3c1$d97069c0$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 423 Lines: 13 On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Nick Humphries wrote: > PCs don't have gzip by default. What's wrong with writing a custom compression > routine which is portable between the various platforms? Why reinvent the wheel *again*? WinZip can handle gzip, and most windows machines have winzip. If they don't, I can supply a Win95 version of gzip (precompiled), and bzip2. (I thought I could give tar as well, but that be b0rken.) Paul From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Fri Jul 2 08:01:44 1999 X-Sender: asc25@pop3.house Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 23:53:33 +0100 To: "Sam users' mailing list" From: Andrew Collier Subject: Johnna Teare's website X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 702 Lines: 21 Hi - DoeS aNyBody know what's hapenned to Johnna Teare's website, or at least the Sam2Sam pages there? I've just got a message from dmoz[1] saying that the site is unavailable. Actually some of the files are there, but apparently not the index page. Andrew [1] dmoz is the Mozilla Open Directory project, for which I'm editing the Sam Coupe directory. See http://dmoz.org/Computers/Operating_Systems/Sinclair/SAM_Coup%e9/ for details, or to submit your own URL etc.... -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Fri Jul 2 08:51:10 1999 From: Frode Tenneboe Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 09:49:13 +0200 (MET DST) Message-Id: <199907020749.JAA11851@asmal.edh.ericsson.se> To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: removals MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 115 Lines: 8 I have just removed: slawek@math.uni-goettingen.de D.A.Fulton@durham.ac.uk due to failure of delivery. -Frode From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Fri Jul 2 14:06:42 1999 Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 15:05:10 +0200 (MET DST) From: Aley Keprt To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a In-Reply-To: Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 847 Lines: 20 On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Andrew Collier wrote: > Two months ago, you were saying people should be careful about piracy, ie > not allowing image files of protected disks to be made. Which I think is > probably a sensible idea... > > But don't you think that memory-snapshots will also encourage piracy or > illegal copying? We play arcade game tournaments. I'm the organizer and I need to see how high score people got, that's mean I need an encrypted snapshot of whole Sam program. That's all. And when we play Snake Mania I though it is legal. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Fri Jul 2 14:25:11 1999 Message-ID: Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 14:22:47 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a In-Reply-To: <377BEB79.45BD9F51@bonbon.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 496 Lines: 13 Martin Fitzpatrick wrote: >I think the point is that the custom compression would be built into the >main Sim-Coupe program, so whenever you open up a compressed DSK file, >its automatically decompressed on the fly... So the user doesn't even >know Zlib would be built in, too. Anyway, the only problem people have with using seperate programs is that they sometimes have to be downloaded seperately. If saaemu was distributed along with simcoupe, people would be quite happy. -- Stuart Brady From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Fri Jul 2 21:18:25 1999 From: "Robert van der Veeke" To: Subject: Re: The end of times and other silly stuff (was Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a) Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 22:14:18 +0200 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: Microsoft Internet Mail 4.70.1157 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <19990702201612.6120D3ABC@maillist.kabelfoon.nl> X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1026 Lines: 28 > Van: Andrew Gale > Aan: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no > Onderwerp: Re: The end of times and other silly stuff (was Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a) > Datum: vrijdag, juli 02, 1999 12:36 > > > Completely off topic now: How far are they with the "London Eye" Millenium > > Ferris wheel? Because my dad is working on that project and i hope he makes > > it back to the Netherlands next friday. > > > > They're still going ahead with that then, are they? (I guess so) > Isn't is wave powered and going to take ten minutes or so to > do a complete circle? It might be nice looking out over the london > skyline for a second or two.... but ten minutes?! Going ahead? :) they are almost finished (at least the part that my dad and his shipmates of Takmarine play in this project). -- Robert van der Veeke, aka RJV Graphics [rjvveeke@caiw.nl] Currently listening to : Rurouni Kenshin - Brilliant collection - Char's Gelgoog was using a double-bladed beam saber nearly 20 years before Darth Maul came down the pike! From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sat Jul 3 10:00:32 1999 From: dean@error.demon.co.uk (Dean Liversidge) To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Sat, 03 Jul 1999 08:52:39 GMT Message-ID: <377dceee.4597684@post.demon.co.uk> References: <004701bda52d$51fba6c0$9c5008c3@persona> In-Reply-To: <004701bda52d$51fba6c0$9c5008c3@persona> X-Mailer: Forte Agent 1.5/32.452 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 378 Lines: 14 On Wed, 1 Jul 1998 21:17:48 +0100, "David L" wrote: >Of course the whole calender is complete shite... about 5-20 years out of >synch depending on who you believe....! I thinks someone elses calender is a bit out of sync...... 1998 ?????? I nearly list this post in the depths of my archives (oh errr ;) -- Dean Liversidge dean@error.demon.co.uk From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sat Jul 3 10:58:08 1999 Message-ID: <003d01bda660$79bde040$b75008c3@persona> From: "David L" To: Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Fri, 3 Jul 1998 09:56:30 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.1 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 728 Lines: 29 Just trying to re-address the balance a little! -----Original Message----- From: Dean Liversidge To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: 03 July 1999 10:01 Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Thanks for using NetForward! http://www.netforward.com v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v On Wed, 1 Jul 1998 21:17:48 +0100, "David L" wrote: >Of course the whole calender is complete shite... about 5-20 years out of >synch depending on who you believe....! I thinks someone elses calender is a bit out of sync...... 1998 ?????? I nearly list this post in the depths of my archives (oh errr ;) -- Dean Liversidge dean@error.demon.co.uk From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sat Jul 3 11:09:13 1999 Message-ID: <007801bda661$a1db8a40$b75008c3@persona> From: "David L" To: Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Fri, 3 Jul 1998 10:04:47 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.1 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 483 Lines: 18 Bugger! Hope it waits until after the Manchester Mardi Gras! -----Original Message----- From: Ian Collier To: 'sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no' Date: 01 July 1999 17:50 Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a >WW3? I thought it was just the end of the world on July 4th. >Of course, on uk.media there is someone claiming that the earth >will be wiped out by a comet which will first become visible >during the eclipse in August. > >imc > > From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sat Jul 3 16:38:44 1999 X-Lotus-FromDomain: POSTMASTER From: Samsboss@postmaster.co.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Message-ID: <802567A3.0056BE9B.00@nun.postmaster.co.uk> Date: Sat, 3 Jul 1999 16:28:29 +0100 Subject: Re: Format Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 843 Lines: 31 | The last issue was dated October 1998 and that was received during | March/April 1999.sine then I have sent a letter to Bob but again no reply | and when you phone him there is a recorded message with up to 30 callers on | it. I say its goodbye to format and maybe the end of the line for Sam as | Format have all the spares as well. Maybe somebody know different. | -----Original Message----- | From: Dave Whitmore | To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no | Date: Thursday, June 17, 1999 11:17 AM | Subject: Format | | | | What's the story with Format these days. Any news - anybody? | | Dave | If you have read my past messages you will know that Bob hopes to restart Format very soon. Try sending him a direct email at Format.Publications@ukf.net -- Samsboss - The One And Only. Accept No Others. From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sat Jul 3 16:38:44 1999 X-Lotus-FromDomain: POSTMASTER From: Samsboss@postmaster.co.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Message-ID: <802567A3.0056DF86.00@nun.postmaster.co.uk> Date: Sat, 3 Jul 1999 16:30:22 +0100 Subject: Re: Sam -year 2000-The Secretary Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 192 Lines: 14 | Has anyone got a fix for the Secretary wordprocessor to make understand the | year 2000 I think it is MasterDOS that needs a patch. -- Samsboss - The One And Only. Accept No Others. From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sat Jul 3 19:10:53 1999 Message-ID: <009401bda6a4$fd5cb2c0$a15008c3@persona> From: "David L" To: Subject: Re: Format Date: Fri, 3 Jul 1998 18:06:56 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.1 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1205 Lines: 48 Nice to see u back Bob -----Original Message----- From: Samsboss@postmaster.co.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: 03 July 1999 16:41 Subject: Re: Format >Thanks for using NetForward! >http://www.netforward.com >v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v > > > > >| The last issue was dated October 1998 and that was received during >| March/April 1999.sine then I have sent a letter to Bob but again no reply >| and when you phone him there is a recorded message with up to 30 callers on >| it. I say its goodbye to format and maybe the end of the line for Sam as >| Format have all the spares as well. Maybe somebody know different. >| -----Original Message----- >| From: Dave Whitmore >| To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no >| Date: Thursday, June 17, 1999 11:17 AM >| Subject: Format >| >| >| >| What's the story with Format these days. Any news - anybody? >| >| Dave >| > > >If you have read my past messages you will know that Bob hopes to restart Format >very soon. Try sending him a direct email at Format.Publications@ukf.net > > > >-- >Samsboss - The One And Only. >Accept No Others. > > > > From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Mon Jul 5 22:06:13 1999 Message-ID: <37811B38.1A0FF2E8@btinternet.com> Date: Mon, 05 Jul 1999 21:53:12 +0100 From: Thomas Harte X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en-gb] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en-GB,en,en-* MIME-Version: 1.0 To: SAM Mailing List Subject: Using my SAM to copy non-SAM format disks Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 786 Lines: 20 Hi, I have a need to duplicate a BBC style ADFS single density disk, but have discovered that every IBM PC I can find has broken single density floppy disk compatibility, such that none of the physical sector copiers will work. However, I remember picking up a SAM disk magazine at an All Formats show which came on single density floppies, and so I am aware that the SAM disk interface has no such problems. Therefore, is there any tool available for my 256kb SAM that will copy such a disk for me? I'm also aware that KE-Disk (since I owned it twice counting the later distribution with Fred) was a BASIC program that could read non-SAM format disks. So perhaps there is a place somewhere where I could just read up on the correct commands to write such a program? -Thomas From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Mon Jul 5 22:33:47 1999 Subject: Re: Using my SAM to copy non-SAM format disks To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Mon, 5 Jul 1999 22:29:32 +0100 (BST) In-Reply-To: <37811B38.1A0FF2E8@btinternet.com> from "Thomas Harte" at Jul 5, 99 09:53:12 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: From: Andrew Gale X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1409 Lines: 29 > I'm also aware that KE-Disk (since I owned it twice counting the later > distribution with Fred) was a BASIC program that could read non-SAM > format disks. So perhaps there is a place somewhere where I could just > read up on the correct commands to write such a program? > Most of the simple whole-disc copiers seem to just read the disc sector-by-sector and then churn it out the same way. The copier on Enceladus (3, I think) does this, compressing it as it goes, so sometimes a whole disc will fit in memory. It basically just uses the READ AT
and WRITE AT
(sommat like that - check the disc manual for exact syntax). The only thing is: does the BBC disc have 9 or 10 sectors per track? (Assuming we're talking 3.5" here) copying sector-by-sector is fine, but the destination disc will need to be pre-formatted. The SAM can format at 10 sectors per track, and I think there is a program that will format at 9 sectors per track. It may be best to format the destination disc on your BBC / a PC if it is 9 sectors. I've got a PC reader (can't remember what it's called ... PC DISC? It came from Nev's Software, I think) that says you can sometimes write to a 10 sector per track disc, ignoring the last sector on the track, and some PCs can cope. That's all I know! I'm sure Ian, Simon, and plenty of others know tons about disc formats. Andy From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Mon Jul 5 23:44:16 1999 Message-ID: <19990705223636.36102.qmail@hotmail.com> X-Originating-IP: [38.28.97.116] From: "Simon Cooke" To: References: Subject: Re: Using my SAM to copy non-SAM format disks Date: Mon, 5 Jul 1999 15:37:21 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2615.200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1050 Lines: 21 > The only thing is: does the BBC disc have 9 or 10 sectors per track? > (Assuming we're talking 3.5" here) copying sector-by-sector is fine, > but the destination disc will need to be pre-formatted. The SAM > can format at 10 sectors per track, and I think there is a program > that will format at 9 sectors per track. It may be best to format > the destination disc on your BBC / a PC if it is 9 sectors. IIRC, it has 9 sectors per track. But I wouldn't worry about that; as long as you don't use the last sector, everything will be fine. > I've got a PC reader (can't remember what it's called ... PC DISC? > It came from Nev's Software, I think) that says you can sometimes > write to a 10 sector per track disc, ignoring the last sector on the > track, and some PCs can cope. Most, if not all, should be able to cope :) Actually, the ideal program would write to a SAM disk from a PC, and would know how to avoid the last sector. You'd end up with less data space, and a maximum of 17 files per disk, but it should work quite happily. Simon From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 6 00:54:56 1999 X-Sender: asc25@pop3.house Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Mon, 5 Jul 1999 23:52:47 +0100 To: "Sam users' mailing list" From: Andrew Collier Subject: Bizarre SimCoupe .dsk problem X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO X-Status: A Content-Length: 1994 Lines: 49 Some of you who read comp.sys.sinclair may be aware of a recent thread in which Stuart Campbell (ex-YS writer) has been trying to get SimCoupe to run. Because some of his questions have come up before and may come up again, I put together a quick web page at http://mnemotech.ucam.org/newbie.html Unfortunately, it seems that some of the sample .dsk images on my site are not working correctly. However, I suspect the problem is restricted to Windows... probably trying to do something clever behind the user's back - we just have to work out exactly what it is :) I've tried uploading, downloading, redownloading and reuploading the file at /downloads/samdos2.dsk.gz - I'm now pretty certain that the file my Mac downloads is exactly the same file as it uploaded. I'm also certain that the file is also correctly downloaded and ungzipped by Linux[1], and the file appears to be the same even on Windows98. However, on SimCoupe/MacOS the file works; on SimCoupe/DOS the file doesn't work (it gives "Loading Error" when I try to boot). I'd like people to help me identify (and perhaps fix) the problem by testing three things: Please download that file from the website, on as many different platforms as possible, and tell me whether or not they work. Also please download some of the MNEMOtech demos from /mnemotech.html, and tell me if they work on different platforms. Finally please download some of the same demos from ftp://ftp.nvg.ntnu.no/pub/sam-coupe/demos/ and tell me if they work on different platforms. Hopefully, if certain files fail under certain conditions, I might be able to work out exactly which combinations are to be avoided.... Thanks in advance, Andrew [1] Which probably indicates that Macgzip has been successfully tamed... -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 6 01:21:29 1999 X-Sender: asc25@pop3.house Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <37811B38.1A0FF2E8@btinternet.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 00:14:13 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Andrew Collier Subject: Re: Using my SAM to copy non-SAM format disks X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 2221 Lines: 52 >Hi, > > I have a need to duplicate a BBC style ADFS single density disk, but >have discovered that every IBM PC I can find has broken single density >floppy disk compatibility, such that none of the physical sector copiers >will work. Do you really mean single density? (as opposed to double which the Sam normally uses, or High which the PC normally uses) The tech docs for the VL1772-02 floppy controller chip do indeed claim that it can handle single density, although they think you're using 5.25 inch disks.... HOWEVER the disk state (single or double density) is determined by the signal on an input pin[1] rather than by software, and I'd be prepared to bet that the Sam hardwires it to double density. If not, it will depend on the capability of the drive. I'd say you're probably out of luck. > However, I remember picking up a SAM disk magazine at an All Formats >show which came on single density floppies, and so I am aware that the >SAM disk interface has no such problems. Yes, but was it *formatted* as single or double density? Using inferior disks may well tend to cause errors, but the formats certainly don't necessarily need to match. For example, I often use HD disks formatted as DD, just because I can't find DD any more. I was not aware that SamDOS was written to cope with anything other than 800K disks, although someone else who has hacked about with it more than I have may know different (Edwin?) > Therefore, is there any tool available for my 256kb SAM that will copy >such a disk for me? > > I'm also aware that KE-Disk (since I owned it twice counting the later >distribution with Fred) was a BASIC program that could read non-SAM >format disks. So perhaps there is a place somewhere where I could just >read up on the correct commands to write such a program? Most of the meat of KE-Disk was actually written in machine code, for speed. Anything more complicated than sector reads and writes you will not be able to achieve in BASIC. Andrew [1] 26 -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 6 01:58:29 1999 Message-ID: <001601bda86f$ef6ee3a0$815008c3@persona> From: "David L" To: Subject: Re: Using my SAM to copy non-SAM format disks Date: Mon, 6 Jul 1998 00:52:12 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.1 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 461 Lines: 15 -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Collier To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: 06 July 1999 01:23 Subject: Re: Using my SAM to copy non-SAM format disks >Most of the meat of KE-Disk was actually written in machine code, for >speed. Anything more complicated than sector reads and writes you will not >be able to achieve in BASIC. That program that Nev Young was selling for about 25 quid was written in Basic.... From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 6 18:37:04 1999 Message-Id: <199907061730.NAA01713@msuacad.morehead-st.edu> From: "James R Curry" To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 13:36:30 +0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Using my SAM to copy non-SAM format disks In-reply-to: References: <37811B38.1A0FF2E8@btinternet.com> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Windows (v3.01d) X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 383 Lines: 12 > > I have a need to duplicate a BBC style ADFS single density disk, but > >have discovered that every IBM PC I can find has broken single density > >floppy disk compatibility, such that none of the physical sector copiers > >will work. The really spooky thing is, Wal-Mart sell DD disks at under $5 a box.. -- James R Curry - James@curry.com "The Balloon Doggies DEMANDED it!" From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 6 18:47:13 1999 Message-ID: <006a01bec7d7$0477aac0$d36b883e@sadsnail> From: "Tim" To: References: <37811B38.1A0FF2E8@btinternet.com> <199907061730.NAA01713@msuacad.morehead-st.edu> Subject: Re: Using my SAM to copy non-SAM format disks Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 18:43:03 +0100 Organization: Sad Snail Productions MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 189 Lines: 9 > The really spooky thing is, Wal-Mart sell DD disks at under $5 a > box.. Not really, I've seen quite a few places here that sell them at 1.99 a box... Just not saying where ;-) ....@/ From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 6 18:56:38 1999 Message-Id: <199907061752.NAA03546@msuacad.morehead-st.edu> From: "James R Curry" To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 13:58:46 +0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Using my SAM to copy non-SAM format disks In-reply-to: <006a01bec7d7$0477aac0$d36b883e@sadsnail> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Windows (v3.01d) X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO X-Status: A Content-Length: 183 Lines: 11 > Just not saying where ;-) > > ....@/ > Book Sale in Stratford had them at 1.50. Until I bought them all. -- James R Curry - James@curry.com "The Balloon Doggies DEMANDED it!" From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 6 19:36:08 1999 From: davgw@clara.co.uk (Dave Whitmore) To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Sam -year 2000-The Secretary Date: Tue, 06 Jul 1999 18:31:38 GMT Message-ID: <3782e892.853954@relay.clara.net> References: <802567A3.0056DF86.00@nun.postmaster.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <802567A3.0056DF86.00@nun.postmaster.co.uk> X-Mailer: Forte Agent 1.5/32.451 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 329 Lines: 14 On Sat, 3 Jul 1999 16:30:22 +0100 Sat, 3 Jul 99 17:04:50 BST, Samsboss@postmaster.co.uk wrote: > > > >| Has anyone got a fix for the Secretary wordprocessor to make understand the >| year 2000 > > >I think it is MasterDOS that needs a patch. Waste of time anyway. Who the hell would want to use that crap in this day and age? From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 6 19:36:08 1999 From: davgw@clara.co.uk (Dave Whitmore) To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Format Date: Tue, 06 Jul 1999 18:31:40 GMT Message-ID: <3783010f.7125171@relay.clara.net> References: <802567A3.0056BE9B.00@nun.postmaster.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <802567A3.0056BE9B.00@nun.postmaster.co.uk> X-Mailer: Forte Agent 1.5/32.451 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 420 Lines: 22 On Sat, 3 Jul 1999 16:28:29 +0100 Sat, 3 Jul 99 17:04:49 BST, Samsboss@postmaster.co.uk wrote: >| >| What's the story with Format these days. Any news - anybody? >| >| Dave >| > > >If you have read my past messages you will know that Bob hopes to restart Format >very soon. Try sending him a direct email at Format.Publications@ukf.net And feelings of euphoria swept through the SAM universe. Bye for now, Dave From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 6 21:01:25 1999 X-Lotus-FromDomain: POSTMASTER From: Samsboss@postmaster.co.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Message-ID: <802567A6.006EE76F.00@nun.postmaster.co.uk> Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 20:51:23 +0100 Subject: Re: Sam -year 2000-The Secretary Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 451 Lines: 25 | On Sat, 3 Jul 1999 16:30:22 +0100 Sat, 3 Jul 99 17:04:50 BST, | Samsboss@postmaster.co.uk wrote: | | > | > | > | >| Has anyone got a fix for the Secretary wordprocessor to make understand the | >| year 2000 | > | > | >I think it is MasterDOS that needs a patch. | | Waste of time anyway. Who the hell would want to use that crap in this | day and age? Are we talking MasterDos or Secretary? -- Samsboss - The One And Only. Accept No Others. From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 6 21:03:47 1999 X-Lotus-FromDomain: POSTMASTER From: Samsboss@postmaster.co.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Message-ID: <802567A6.006F540A.00@nun.postmaster.co.uk> Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 20:55:09 +0100 Subject: Re: Format Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 117 Lines: 14 | Nice to see u back Bob [cut] Don't you start that again. -- Samsboss - The One And Only. Accept No Others. From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 6 21:15:32 1999 Message-ID: <006401bda912$5d011760$705808c3@persona> From: "David L" To: Subject: Re: Format Date: Mon, 6 Jul 1998 20:14:55 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.1 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 259 Lines: 14 -----Original Message----- From: Samsboss@postmaster.co.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: 06 July 1999 21:05 Subject: Re: Format >| Nice to see u back Bob >[cut] >Don't you start that again. Right Bob From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 6 21:23:01 1999 Message-Id: <199907062015.QAA19772@msuacad.morehead-st.edu> From: "James R Curry" To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 16:21:46 +0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Format In-reply-to: <802567A6.006F540A.00@nun.postmaster.co.uk> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Windows (v3.01d) X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 177 Lines: 15 > | Nice to see u back Bob > [cut] > > > Don't you start that again. > Start what, Bob? *ducks* ;) -- James R Curry - James@curry.com "The Balloon Doggies DEMANDED it!" From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 6 23:02:15 1999 Message-ID: <000b01bec7fa$83fd0060$410bf0d4@chris> From: "The President" To: References: <802567A3.0056DF86.00@nun.postmaster.co.uk> <3782e892.853954@relay.clara.net> Subject: What File Format is a .TRD Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 22:56:27 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2314.1300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 109 Lines: 5 What File Format is a .TRD , and what Specy emu will run it ?? (its for Doom incase anyone wondered) Chris From imc@comlab.ox.ac.uk Wed Jul 7 00:13:41 1999 Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1999 00:13:41 +0100 From: Ian Collier To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Using my SAM to copy non-SAM format disks Message-ID: <19990707001341.B666@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mail-Followup-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no References: <006a01bec7d7$0477aac0$d36b883e@sadsnail> <199907061752.NAA03546@msuacad.morehead-st.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.1i In-Reply-To: <199907061752.NAA03546@msuacad.morehead-st.edu>; from James R Curry on Tue, Jul 06, 1999 at 01:58:46PM +0000 Status: RO Content-Length: 213 Lines: 6 On Tue, Jul 06, 1999 at 01:58:46PM +0000, James R Curry wrote: > Book Sale in Stratford had them at 1.50. Until I bought them all. Good heavens. I've just been past that shop today. Didn't go in, though. imc From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Wed Jul 7 00:50:26 1999 Message-ID: <37829419.2CDA9E9@btinternet.com> Date: Wed, 07 Jul 1999 00:41:13 +0100 From: Thomas Harte X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en-gb] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en-GB,en,en-* MIME-Version: 1.0 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Using my SAM to copy non-SAM format disks References: <199907061752.NAA03546@msuacad.morehead-st.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from QUOTED-PRINTABLE to 8bit by mail.comlab.ox.ac.uk id AAA10178 Status: RO Content-Length: 210 Lines: 6 > Book Sale in Stratford had them at 1.50. Until I bought them all. Dixons / Currys / whatever seem to be happy to do them from some regular source for Ł2.50 or Ł2.00 or something like that . . . -Thomas From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Wed Jul 7 08:25:36 1999 From: "Si Owen" To: Subject: RE: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1999 08:20:49 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) In-reply-to: <007101bec16b$28802220$6b51c29e@inf.upol.cz> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 Importance: Normal X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 821 Lines: 22 Aley Keprt wrote: > Si Owen still haven't released anything, so here is anothrer DOS version. That's because Si Owen has only just returned from holiday - I've not even had a chance to catch up on the SAM users list yet! > since we must discuss the fileformat at first. (I don't want to make my own > standards as Si does.) Then how do you explain the following in SimCoupe's fdi.h: #define SAD_FORMAT_ID "Aley's disk backup" The only thing I've added is a disk format that can describe any type of SAM disk, regular or protected, as none of the existing disk formats can handle that. .SAD disks are only .DSK files with a small header than nobody seems to use anyway, but the new images are designed to be flexible enough for any disk format possible on a regular SAM disk. What's so bad about that? Si From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Wed Jul 7 08:43:10 1999 From: "Si Owen" To: Subject: RE: ANNOUNCEMENT 2 Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1999 08:41:20 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) In-reply-to: <00a901bebb74$a283ce20$935008c3@persona> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 Importance: Normal X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 187 Lines: 7 David L wrote: > The updated Persona Web site - as designed by the talented Gordon Wallis > - is now up at www.persona.clara.net Does that mean Persona's back open for business too? Si From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 8 11:56:59 1999 Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 12:46:19 +0200 (MET DST) From: Aley Keprt To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: spec 128 In-Reply-To: Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1037 Lines: 26 On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Andrew Gale wrote: > > I haven't checked the FAQ but on the +3 it's 4 and 4 and I'd be > > surprised if the other 128K models were different. I don't know > > how the hardware is arranged but this would seem to indicate > > that it's in two blocks of 64K. > > > > If there are four chips, then 2 banks of 64K seems likely. But in that > case, I'd expect four 16K banks to be contended, not two.... hmmm... > the plot thickens! There are 8 banks, 4 slow & 4 fast. It doesn't depend on the memory (the chips are the same), but on the ULA (or how is it called...). So the chips are the same, but the speed is different. You can look into "Z80" spectrum emulator documentation, there is possibly more information. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 8 12:02:56 1999 Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 11:50:15 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Collier X-Sender: asc25@orange.csi.cam.ac.uk To: Sam-users Subject: Call for votes! Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1490 Lines: 40 As you might me aware, I've added a new-user's guide to my webpages at http://mnemotech.ucam.org - the last section on the page is about "Essential Sam programs"... In an attempt to generate some potentially interesting discussion on this list, I'm asking for people's opinions as to which programs should be included in this section. The requirements are: 1) It's a good program Well duh! You wouldn't vote for it otherwise... Demos, games, even utilities or anything else are okay. But I probably want to include a total of less than ten programs, otherwise it becomes more a list of available software, rather than listing just the essentials. 2) It's SimCoupe compatible and can be saved in a .dsk file Or at least, it must work mostly correctly with SimCoupe 0.72-derived versions or later. 3) I can legally put it on the server That probably means no commercial software. I'm happy to include any program if the programmer is known to be happy about his software being distibuted on line (especially if the program is already available, for example on nvg) - or at least if he can be contacted and asked. So, which programs should I put in there? The demobase is, of course, always available if you need to jog your memory a bit.... Andrew -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 8 13:00:46 1999 Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 13:58:23 +0200 (MET DST) From: Aley Keprt To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter In-Reply-To: <262f30f9.24a91832@aol.com> Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1250 Lines: 28 On Mon, 28 Jun 1999 PGLOVER43@aol.com wrote: > I believe there was a Sam screen converter in an old issue of SAM Supplement. > The program formatted a SAM disk to a sort-of PC format, which allowed you > to save about a dozen SAM screenshots to it in a PC format (.BMP or .JPG?) I > can't remember which issue it was, or how it worked, but I managed to convert > about thirty SAM mode 4 screens, which must indicate it was very easy to use! > > Anyone remember this program? If I come across it, I'll let everyone know, as > it was a very good little utility. > > Phil Glover. I asked for Sam->PC converter for DOS/Windows!!! Why everybody tells me "use Fred issue no.x". I have pictures on hard drive and need to convert them to ANY normal picture format. Currently I use SamView which displays Sam pictures, and then press PrtScr (under Win32). Then I copy the image from the clipboard. That's working fine, but it is too complicated. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 8 13:09:48 1999 Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 14:00:52 +0200 (MET DST) From: Aley Keprt To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: your mail In-Reply-To: <19990630075147.71741.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1080 Lines: 24 On Wed, 30 Jun 1999, Rob Smith wrote: > Hello Sam Users, > > I recently rediscovered my Spectrum and Sam and have since been transferring > Specy games to Sam disc via a Messenger. I have to get rid of quite a few > specy game as I have little space to keep them all (although I am keeping a > select few). Anyway this brings me to two questions... > > 1, Is there any software that will allow me to compress the messenger files > on my Sam disc as I can only get 11 games on 1 disc? > > 2, Does anyone want any Spectrum games? (there are about one > hundred)Although I can't afford to post the games so they would have to be > collected. ftp.nvg contains thousands of ZXS games (possibly...), so there is no need for your ones, especially when they are "Sam-only". ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 8 13:29:26 1999 From: "Robert van der Veeke" To: Subject: Re: your mail Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 14:19:52 +0200 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: Microsoft Internet Mail 4.70.1157 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <19990708122146.1A3403A91@maillist.kabelfoon.nl> X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 915 Lines: 29 > Van: Aley Keprt > Aan: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no > Onderwerp: Re: your mail > Datum: donderdag, juli 08, 1999 2:00 > > 2, Does anyone want any Spectrum games? (there are about one > > hundred)Although I can't afford to post the games so they would have to be > > collected. > > ftp.nvg contains thousands of ZXS games (possibly...), so there is no need > for your ones, especially when they are "Sam-only". Read carefully "Although I can't afford to post the games so they would have to be collected." So i guess that these are tapes, boxes ect. You can do a lot on the internet, but teleporting is still not possible (and will NOT, never ever). -- Robert van der Veeke, aka RJV Graphics [rjvveeke@caiw.nl] Currently listening to : Rurouni Kenshin - Brilliant collection - Char's Gelgoog was using a double-bladed beam saber nearly 20 years before Darth Maul came down the pike! From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 8 13:35:14 1999 Subject: Re: your mail To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 13:29:56 +0100 (BST) In-Reply-To: <19990708122146.1A3403A91@maillist.kabelfoon.nl> from "Robert van der Veeke" at Jul 8, 99 02:19:52 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: From: Andrew Gale X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 106 Lines: 4 > internet, but teleporting is still not possible (and will NOT, never ever). > Are you sure about that? From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 8 19:02:31 1999 From: davgw@clara.co.uk (Dave Whitmore) To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Sam -year 2000-The Secretary Date: Thu, 08 Jul 1999 18:01:23 GMT Message-ID: <3785d5c3.6983411@relay.clara.net> References: <802567A6.006EE76F.00@nun.postmaster.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <802567A6.006EE76F.00@nun.postmaster.co.uk> X-Mailer: Forte Agent 1.5/32.451 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 358 Lines: 19 On Tue, 6 Jul 1999 20:51:23 +0100 Wed, 7 Jul 99 20:02:34 BST, Samsboss@postmaster.co.uk wrote: >| >I think it is MasterDOS that needs a patch. >| >| Waste of time anyway. Who the hell would want to use that crap in this >| day and age? > >Are we talking MasterDos or Secretary? The Secretary. Do you think it's wonderful then? :) Bye for now, Dave From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 8 19:30:06 1999 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 19:28:06 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 670 Lines: 14 In message , Aley Keprt writes >Currently I use SamView which displays Sam pictures, and then press PrtScr >(under Win32). Then I copy the image from the clipboard. That's working >fine, but it is too complicated. Well... A Sam screen file is a plain simple 1, 2, or 4-bit bitmap, with a palette (also storing line interrupt info). A BMP is a horizontally mirrored 1, 2, or 4-bit bitmap, with a palette. It shouldn't be too much trouble for a programmer such as yourself. If you have to, convert the bulk of the image to BMP, and enter the palette info yourself... -- Stuart Brady From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 8 23:47:33 1999 From: "Paul Walker" Organization: very little To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 21:05:18 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter Message-ID: In-reply-to: References: X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.11) X-Hops: 1 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 426 Lines: 12 > a palette (also storing line interrupt info). A BMP is a horizontally > mirrored 1, 2, or 4-bit bitmap, with a palette. It shouldn't be too much Vertically, last time I looked. That is, it's stored upside down. Never did work out why. Paul -- I kinda like You my, honourable friend, are a liar said by John Major to one of the members of the opposition. -- John Clear, (mis?)quoting John Major in alt.sysadmin.recovery From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Fri Jul 9 19:13:58 1999 Message-ID: <37863715.32712414@btinternet.com> Date: Fri, 09 Jul 1999 18:53:25 +0100 From: Thomas Harte X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en-gb] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en-GB,en,en-* MIME-Version: 1.0 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 238 Lines: 7 > Well... A Sam screen file is a plain simple 1, 2, or 4-bit bitmap, with > a palette (also storing line interrupt info). A BMP is a horizontally Anyone able to say where the palette comes (before or after) and in what form? -Thomas From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Fri Jul 9 19:49:24 1999 Message-ID: <02JQLBATJkh3EwJl@wholehog.demon.co.uk> Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1999 19:41:23 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 468 Lines: 14 Paul Walker writes >> a palette (also storing line interrupt info). A BMP is a horizontally >> mirrored 1, 2, or 4-bit bitmap, with a palette. It shouldn't be too much >Vertically, last time I looked. >That is, it's stored upside down. Never did work out why. I always get horizontally mirrored and vertically mirrored the wrong way round... Horizontally mirrored should mean that the image gets mirrored along the horizontal (y=0), shouldn't it? -- Stuart Brady From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Fri Jul 9 22:13:22 1999 Message-ID: <37866536.1515@clara.net> Date: Fri, 09 Jul 1999 22:10:14 +0100 From: Gordon Wallis Organization: HEXdidn't... X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (Win95; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter References: <02JQLBATJkh3EwJl@wholehog.demon.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 993 Lines: 27 Stuart Brady wrote: > > Paul Walker writes > > >> a palette (also storing line interrupt info). A BMP is a horizontally > >> mirrored 1, 2, or 4-bit bitmap, with a palette. It shouldn't be too much > > >Vertically, last time I looked. > > >That is, it's stored upside down. Never did work out why. > > I always get horizontally mirrored and vertically mirrored the wrong way > round... Horizontally mirrored should mean that the image gets mirrored > along the horizontal (y=0), shouldn't it? > Shouldn't really, no... 'Horizontally mirrored' means flipped left-to-right, 'vertically mirrored' means flipped top-to-bottom. Think of it as a description of the movement, rather than a reference to the axis. Not that this is particularly useful... :) -- < The HEXdidn't... Homepage: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> < ------ Featuring The U.K. Policenauts Homepage ------ > <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< http://www.hexdidnt.clara.net > \---------- AOL Instant Messenger: 'hexdidnt' ----------/ From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sat Jul 10 01:27:32 1999 Message-ID: <3785B44A.AC94EE3C@tesco.net> Date: Fri, 09 Jul 1999 09:35:25 +0100 From: Diggory Gray X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 (Macintosh; I; PPC) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: your mail References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 282 Lines: 14 Hi di ho.... Andrew Gale wrote: > > > internet, but teleporting is still not possible (and will NOT, never ever). > > > > Are you sure about that? Thought I heard some stuff recently about quantum entangled teleportation using photons... Straying off the subject? :-) Diggory From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sat Jul 10 02:54:14 1999 Message-ID: <002501beca76$05af9fa0$0aa2edc1@pre-installedco> From: "Jonathan Bristow" To: Subject: Re: your mail Date: Sat, 10 Jul 1999 02:46:24 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3155.0 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3155.0 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 567 Lines: 29 hmmm I also heard that some scientists have managed to teleport a single Atom. Respect Another Stranger -----Original Message----- From: Diggory Gray To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: 10 July 1999 01:32 Subject: Re: your mail >Hi di ho.... > >Andrew Gale wrote: >> >> > internet, but teleporting is still not possible (and will NOT, never ever). >> > >> >> Are you sure about that? > >Thought I heard some stuff recently about quantum entangled teleportation using photons... >Straying off the subject? > :-) > >Diggory > From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sat Jul 10 14:46:13 1999 Message-ID: Date: Sat, 10 Jul 1999 14:40:53 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: your mail In-Reply-To: <002501beca76$05af9fa0$0aa2edc1@pre-installedco> MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 177 Lines: 10 Jonathan Bristow wrote: >hmmm >I also heard that some scientists have managed to teleport a single Atom. How far? And how many floppies have the teleported? -- Stuart Brady From imc@comlab.ox.ac.uk Sat Jul 10 21:22:39 1999 Date: Sat, 10 Jul 1999 21:22:39 +0100 From: Ian Collier To: Sam users' mailing list Subject: Re: Bizarre SimCoupe .dsk problem Message-ID: <19990710212238.A9589@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mail-Followup-To: Sam users' mailing list References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.1i In-Reply-To: ; from Andrew Collier on Mon, Jul 05, 1999 at 11:52:47PM +0100 Status: RO Content-Length: 1390 Lines: 30 On Mon, Jul 05, 1999 at 11:52:47PM +0100, Andrew Collier wrote: > Please download that file from the website, on as many different platforms > as possible, and tell me whether or not they work. Well if you put it on a server that's actually up at weekends it might help... I did get to contact it during the week to ask it what type it thought the disk file was, and I believe it said the type was application/x-gzip with no encoding, which I have reproduced at (that's right, the name doesn't end with gz). The other way that the server might serve the file is as type application/octet-stream with encoding x-gzip, which I have reproduced at the same location with the single letter z added to the name. The file in question is disk which is blank except for a copy of samdos2. The result was that Netscape 3 on Windows did not corrupt either of them. It did say "unknown type application/x-gzip" and "unknown encoding x-gzip", but each file was saved properly and could then be uncompressed and read. I do not have WinZip, GetRight, GoZilla or any app that might interfere with Netscape. Just plain Netscape 3. First time I've used it for ages. I also tried the (sadly rather out of date) sam-users archive, and it did corrupt that, because the encoding x-gzip was unknown to it and it therefore treated it as unencoded text. imc From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sun Jul 11 13:14:42 1999 X-Sender: asc25@pop3.house Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <19990710212238.A9589@comlab.ox.ac.uk> References: ; from Andrew Collier on Mon, Jul 05, 1999 at 11:52:47PM +0100 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 00:32:13 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Andrew Collier Subject: Re: Bizarre SimCoupe .dsk problem X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO X-Status: A Content-Length: 1232 Lines: 28 >On Mon, Jul 05, 1999 at 11:52:47PM +0100, Andrew Collier wrote: >> Please download that file from the website, on as many different platforms >> as possible, and tell me whether or not they work. > >Well if you put it on a server that's actually up at weekends it might help... Until last Wednesday, ban.joh.cam.ac.uk had actually been up for 202 days solid. It unexpectedly went down sometime on Friday, and until the sysadmin can contact the computer manager, it's probably stuck unfortunately... >The result was that Netscape 3 on Windows did not corrupt either >of them. It did say "unknown type application/x-gzip" and >"unknown encoding x-gzip", but each file was saved properly and >could then be uncompressed and read. We think this problem is specific to Internet Explorer 5... interacting with the (perhaps slightly broken) server configuration. It _was_ being served as text/plain with encoding gzip, and should now be served as application/x-gzip compressed when abn reappears. Andrew -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From imc@comlab.ox.ac.uk Sun Jul 11 15:47:29 1999 Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 15:47:29 +0100 From: Ian Collier To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Bizarre SimCoupe .dsk problem Message-ID: <19990711154728.A10377@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mail-Followup-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no References: ; <19990710212238.A9589@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.1i In-Reply-To: ; from Andrew Collier on Sun, Jul 11, 1999 at 12:32:13AM +0100 Status: RO Content-Length: 455 Lines: 10 On Sun, Jul 11, 1999 at 12:32:13AM +0100, Andrew Collier wrote: > Until last Wednesday, ban.joh.cam.ac.uk had actually been up for 202 days > solid. It unexpectedly went down sometime on Friday, and until the sysadmin > can contact the computer manager, it's probably stuck unfortunately... I don't know quite how to interpret "until last Wednesday" but anyway I tried it when you first posted the reply to Stuart Campbell and it was down then too. imc From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sun Jul 11 23:42:50 1999 X-Sender: asc25@pop3.house Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <19990711154728.A10377@comlab.ox.ac.uk> References: ; from Andrew Collier on Sun, Jul 11, 1999 at 12:32:13AM +0100 ; <19990710212238.A9589@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 22:53:38 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Andrew Collier Subject: Re: Bizarre SimCoupe .dsk problem X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO X-Status: A Content-Length: 1208 Lines: 28 >On Sun, Jul 11, 1999 at 12:32:13AM +0100, Andrew Collier wrote: >> Until last Wednesday, ban.joh.cam.ac.uk had actually been up for 202 days >> solid. It unexpectedly went down sometime on Friday, and until the sysadmin >> can contact the computer manager, it's probably stuck unfortunately... > >I don't know quite how to interpret "until last Wednesday" Then upgrade your parser, why don't you? It had been up solidly for the 202 days previous to last Wednesday. It does exactly what it says on the tin. ban.joh booted on December 9th, 1998 running linux kernel 2.0.36 It went down because the computer manager at John's wanted to move from one office to another. It came back up afterwards, and was rebooted shortly afterwards to upgrade kernel (now 2.0.37) And then, sometime of Friday, it went down again. We don't know why. Possibly the computer manager decided to rearrange his office, and forgot to plug ban back in. We'll try and find out more tomorrow.... Andrew -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Mon Jul 12 10:41:03 1999 Message-Id: <004e01becc47$3c43c050$7b51c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 11:16:32 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2" X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from QUOTED-PRINTABLE to 8bit by mail.comlab.ox.ac.uk id KAA24193 Status: RO Content-Length: 1385 Lines: 36 ----- Original Message ----- From: Stuart Brady To: Sent: 8. července 1999 20:28 Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter > In message , > Aley Keprt writes > > >Currently I use SamView which displays Sam pictures, and then press PrtScr > >(under Win32). Then I copy the image from the clipboard. That's working > >fine, but it is too complicated. > > Well... A Sam screen file is a plain simple 1, 2, or 4-bit bitmap, with > a palette (also storing line interrupt info). A BMP is a horizontally > mirrored 1, 2, or 4-bit bitmap, with a palette. It shouldn't be too much > trouble for a programmer such as yourself. If you have to, convert the > bulk of the image to BMP, and enter the palette info yourself... > -- > Stuart Brady > Why everybody still don't hear me??? I didn't say it is a problem, I just want the program. Must I everything which program myself? Even it is easy to do, I prefer to get the program then make it myself. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Mon Jul 12 10:55:10 1999 Message-Id: <006a01becc47$e3040b70$7b51c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: <02JQLBATJkh3EwJl@wholehog.demon.co.uk> <37866536.1515@clara.net> Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 11:21:13 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1454 Lines: 40 > Stuart Brady wrote: > > > > Paul Walker writes > > > > >> a palette (also storing line interrupt info). A BMP is a horizontally > > >> mirrored 1, 2, or 4-bit bitmap, with a palette. It shouldn't be too much > > > > >Vertically, last time I looked. > > > > >That is, it's stored upside down. Never did work out why. > > > > I always get horizontally mirrored and vertically mirrored the wrong way > > round... Horizontally mirrored should mean that the image gets mirrored > > along the horizontal (y=0), shouldn't it? > > > Shouldn't really, no... 'Horizontally mirrored' means flipped > left-to-right, 'vertically mirrored' means flipped top-to-bottom. Think > of it as a description of the movement, rather than a reference to the > axis. > > Not that this is particularly useful... :) Everybody write reply-mails, nobody help..... I already did the program myself (SamView w/PCX save). I will publish the program (DOS/Win) is some days or weeks. I store the picture into 256c PCX, because 16c is not compatible with some weird PC programs. Also, I store border color into 17th palette cell. PCX is compressed, so it *can* be smaller than BMP. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Mon Jul 12 11:11:28 1999 Message-Id: <00b601becc4a$12d137e0$7b51c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 11:36:52 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1427 Lines: 38 > > since we must discuss the fileformat at first. (I don't want to make my > own standards as Si does.) > > Then how do you explain the following in SimCoupe's fdi.h: > #define SAD_FORMAT_ID "Aley's disk backup" SAD is *OLDER* than SimCoupe and samusers@nvg, so I couldn't discuss it. Clear? > The only thing I've added is a disk format that can describe any type of SAM > disk, regular or protected, as none of the existing disk formats can handle > that. .SAD disks are only .DSK files with a small header than nobody seems > to use anyway, but the new images are designed to be flexible enough for any > disk format possible on a regular SAM disk. What's so bad about that? > > Si No problem. I just said I don't want to make any new stadrards as Si does. That's right, isn't it? That's only right, nothing more nothing less. Regardless the file formats, we could add ZIP support to SimCoupe. Imagine you take an existing SAD/DSK/??? file and compress it into a simple ZIP (aka PkZip). Then rename the file back to SAD/DSK/??? and use it in SimCoupe. I'd like to get this work. At least in DOS and Win32 version. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Mon Jul 12 12:59:10 1999 From: "Paul Walker" Organization: very little To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 12:09:51 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter Message-ID: In-reply-to: <006a01becc47$e3040b70$7b51c29e@inf.upol.cz> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.11) X-Hops: 1 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO X-Status: A Content-Length: 518 Lines: 12 > Everybody write reply-mails, nobody help..... I suspect that nobody apart from you actually wants or has a use for the program, which would explain this. I could be wrong, but.. Paul -- My second preferred option would be to have a highly-trained warrior caste who roam silently and efficiently, being polite and helpful to everyone, until they overhear some idiocy. Then they stop it. Silently, efficiently, and making absolutely certain that it won't happen again. -- Greg Wheatley in alt.sysadmin.recovery From imc@comlab.ox.ac.uk Mon Jul 12 14:08:14 1999 Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 14:08:14 +0100 From: Ian Collier To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter Message-ID: <19990712140814.A11234@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mail-Followup-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no References: <006a01becc47$e3040b70$7b51c29e@inf.upol.cz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.1i In-Reply-To: ; from Paul Walker on Mon, Jul 12, 1999 at 12:09:51PM +0100 Status: RO Content-Length: 458 Lines: 10 On Mon, Jul 12, 1999 at 12:09:51PM +0100, Paul Walker wrote: > I suspect that nobody apart from you actually wants or has a use for the > program, which would explain this. I could be wrong, but.. Well I did write samtoppm.c for some reason some time ago, but in order for that to be any use you have to be able to handle ppm files (which is trivial in Linux). Also, it only does mode 4 screens. But it does do screens with "palette line"s in them. imc From imc@comlab.ox.ac.uk Mon Jul 12 15:31:58 1999 Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 15:31:58 +0100 From: Ian Collier To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Bizarre SimCoupe .dsk problem Message-ID: <19990712153158.B11234@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mail-Followup-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no References: ; ; <19990710212238.A9589@comlab.ox.ac.uk> <19990711154728.A10377@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.1i In-Reply-To: ; from Andrew Collier on Sun, Jul 11, 1999 at 10:53:38PM +0100 Status: RO Content-Length: 1028 Lines: 21 On Sun, Jul 11, 1999 at 10:53:38PM +0100, Andrew Collier wrote: > >On Sun, Jul 11, 1999 at 12:32:13AM +0100, Andrew Collier wrote: > >> Until last Wednesday, ban.joh.cam.ac.uk had actually been up for 202 days > >> solid. It unexpectedly went down sometime on Friday, and until the sysadmin > >> can contact the computer manager, it's probably stuck unfortunately... > >I don't know quite how to interpret "until last Wednesday" > Then upgrade your parser, why don't you? Chill out. The following is no longer relevant but provided by way of explanation. Firstly, does "last Wednesday" mean the most recent Wednesday or Wednesday of *last* week? Secondly, by saying it had been up until last Wednesday you appear to imply that it went down on Wednesday but you actually say it went down on Friday, which could be considered confusing. Thirdly, if it did reset its uptime on Wednesday that could mean a five minute reboot or an extended downtime and going on about what happened on Friday doesn't help me guess which. imc From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Mon Jul 12 23:03:12 1999 Message-ID: <378A6433.AE10C70E@btinternet.com> Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 22:54:59 +0100 From: Thomas Harte X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en-gb] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en-GB,en,en-* MIME-Version: 1.0 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter References: <02JQLBATJkh3EwJl@wholehog.demon.co.uk> <37866536.1515@clara.net> <006a01becc47$e3040b70$7b51c29e@inf.upol.cz> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 553 Lines: 13 > PCX is compressed, so it *can* be smaller than BMP. Should save quite a bit with the usual SAM graphics, especially since you are going to need 12 palette changes to go over the single pixel encoding limit. Just by the way (and my reason for posting), you are aware that some PC paint programs have problems with pcx encoded RLE runs over 32 pixels, while others are fine? I don't know what the PCX format officially allows (for those who don't know, there is bit room to store a run length of 63), but this might become an issue . . . -Thomas From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 13 15:46:25 1999 Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 15:44:18 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Collier X-Sender: asc25@orange.csi.cam.ac.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Bizarre SimCoupe .dsk problem In-Reply-To: <19990712153158.B11234@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 702 Lines: 18 On Mon, 12 Jul 1999, Ian Collier wrote: > down on Friday, which could be considered confusing. Thirdly, if it did > reset its uptime on Wednesday that could mean a five minute reboot or an > extended downtime and going on about what happened on Friday doesn't help > me guess which. It is back up now, BTW. There had been a problem with the BNC cabling, so they started unplugging computers until it went away. They just forgot to plug ban back in, that's all. Andrew -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 13 22:21:22 1999 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 21:59:48 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP In-Reply-To: <00b601becc4a$12d137e0$7b51c29e@inf.upol.cz> MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 2744 Lines: 61 >> Then how do you explain the following in SimCoupe's fdi.h: >> #define SAD_FORMAT_ID "Aley's disk backup" >SAD is *OLDER* than SimCoupe and samusers@nvg, so I couldn't discuss it. >Clear? That's fair enough... >No problem. >I just said I don't want to make any new stadrards as Si does. >That's right, isn't it? That's only right, nothing more nothing less. The way I see it, Aley doesn't want to make any new file formats that people don't like. Aley's also discussing the type of compression to be used before implementing it. Aley added sad support, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with adding support for a file format which was written when nobody was around to discuss it. Si, on the other hand, has modified the dsk format without telling anyone (and I really hope he hasn't done anything else). All I have to say is: get the basics working first, then add the extra functionality *AFTER* you've released the source code. I really hoped Si wouldn't do this, but it seems that I was wrong, and that he might be attempting to make the Win32 version better than the others. Then again, Windows programmers are all alike -- they've got no respect for other platforms. DOS programmers are about as bad, too: "Go and get DOS because it's the right STANDARD!!!!" -- if we listened to that sort of advice, we'd all be living in trees. >Regardless the file formats, we could add ZIP support to SimCoupe. Please could you use zlib, with gnuzip files? You'll end up with similar (possibly slightly smaller) file sizes, that way. Btw, the *extentions* can be anything you like, such as saz/sad.gz (gzipped sad), dsz/dsk.gz (gzipped dsk), and sdz/sd.gz. clear? Try not to use zip or gz as a single extention, though. I'm wondering how good a zip/tar.gz format would be for a disk -- i.e, storing the actual files, and not a plain image of the disk. There's probably little point if you're going to gzip it anyway. It would involve replacing SamDOS/MasterDOS functions somehow, though. >Imagine you take an existing SAD/DSK/??? file and compress it into a simple >ZIP (aka PkZip). >Then rename the file back to SAD/DSK/??? and use it in SimCoupe. >I'd like to get this work. At least in DOS and Win32 version. Use zlib, and you can do it internally. At least people won't have to download gzip and install it. If you were to do it externally, I don't think deleting the original compressed file (after uncompressing it for use with simcoupe) would be a very good idea. Understand that the file "image.dsk" might already exist, and be different to the one you're inflating. Btw, I've got an idea: you could treat the floppy as a ramdisk, and load and save images to it -- that would only be optional, of course. -- Stuart Brady From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 13 22:21:22 1999 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 22:07:29 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter In-Reply-To: <006a01becc47$e3040b70$7b51c29e@inf.upol.cz> MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 692 Lines: 21 Aley Keprt wrote: >Everybody write reply-mails, nobody help..... I helped, by suggesting by saying that you only need to mirror the image. That's all I had time to do. If you're going to complain about me not helping you (when they /do/ try to help you), I simply won't bother in the future. [snip] >PCX is compressed, so it *can* be smaller than BMP. PCX isn't exactly complicated. Almost every graphics library ever written has a program which displays PCXs, so it's not too hard to find some documentation or source code. Which you seem to have done. I don't know why you have to complain, though. Thanks for the converter, though, Aley. I might find it useful. :-) -- Stuart Brady From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Tue Jul 13 22:21:22 1999 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 22:14:36 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter In-Reply-To: <004e01becc47$3c43c050$7b51c29e@inf.upol.cz> MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1010 Lines: 28 Aley Keprt wrote: >Why everybody still don't hear me??? I told you _everything_ that I knew, and you're saying that I didn't even try. I simply won't bother in the future -- even if I have something that could actually help you. >I didn't say it is a problem, I just want the program. Tough. You can't just say "write a scr to pcx converter for me" (an easy task for someone who can write an saa1099 emulator) and expect me to do it -- the world doesn't revolve around you. >Must I everything which program myself? Yes. I'm not your slave. Neither is anyone else on this list. >Even it is easy to do, I prefer to get the program then make it myself. You _expect_ people to write it for you? Sorry, but I don't happen to have a C compiler for DOS -- if I did (and if I didn't have better things to do), I would have written it. Now, though... Btw, my whole life might be more important than an scr to pcx converter. I don't enjoy being flamed because I have more serious things to do. -- Stuart Brady From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Wed Jul 14 03:36:18 1999 Message-ID: <19990714023314.45738.qmail@hotmail.com> X-Originating-IP: [38.28.98.15] From: "Simon Cooke" To: References: Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 19:34:01 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2615.200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO X-Status: A Content-Length: 1991 Lines: 45 > Si, on the other hand, has modified the dsk format without telling > anyone (and I really hope he hasn't done anything else). All I have to > say is: get the basics working first, then add the extra functionality > *AFTER* you've released the source code. I really hoped Si wouldn't do > this, but it seems that I was wrong, and that he might be attempting to > make the Win32 version better than the others. > > Then again, Windows programmers are all alike -- they've got no respect > for other platforms. DOS programmers are about as bad, too: "Go and get > DOS because it's the right STANDARD!!!!" -- if we listened to that sort > of advice, we'd all be living in trees. 9/10 for sweeping generalizations, 6/10 for religious warfare tactics, 10/10 for missing the point. "He might be attempting to make the win32 version better than the others"? SO WHAT? 1. He's still working on it. 2. It's under GPL; therefore it'll be released as source code anyway, so you can do a backport if you like. 3. It's his time and effort. It's up to him how he spends it. As you'll have the source, you can spend the time backporting it if you like. 4. The only person who knows what he's doing on it is Simon himself. And heaven forbid that I should take Simon's Win32 port, and add a debugger API to it, and have my win32 assembler system talk to it through that. After all, it wouldn't work on Linux. So we can't do it! "Then again, Windows programmers are all alike -- they've got no respect for other platforms." Sounds like I could say the same about Stuart Brady... no respect for other platforms. Why not just wait and see what happens? Also: the DSK format has NOT been modified. It'll still be the same. There will, however, be ANOTHER format that can correctly represent protected/non-standard disks. The current format has no concept of sector addressing, it doesn't know about different length sectors. So it can handle standard disks, and that's it. That's not sufficient. Simon From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Wed Jul 14 10:20:37 1999 X-sendmail-revision: 29-Mar-1999 (23) by ant@tissoft.co.uk Message-ID: <003701becdd7$a0ed6dd0$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> From: "Nick Humphries" To: Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 10:02:41 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 741 Lines: 22 From: Stuart Brady >Then again, Windows programmers are all alike -- they've got no respect >for other platforms. DOS programmers are about as bad, too: "Go and get >DOS because it's the right STANDARD!!!!" -- if we listened to that sort >of advice, we'd all be living in trees. What colour is the sky in your world? Perhaps you should actually take a proper look at the programming industry. I'm an analyst programmer, working across about five flavours of UNIX, Win32 and OS/2 (both cross-platform work and system-specific), have been in the business for four years now and I've yet to see anything like that which you've just described. Grow up. The extreme anti-Gates act grew old yonks ago. Nick. From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Wed Jul 14 10:21:34 1999 Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 10:03:15 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Collier X-Sender: asc25@red.csi.cam.ac.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1912 Lines: 39 On Tue, 13 Jul 1999, Stuart Brady wrote: > I'm wondering how good a zip/tar.gz format would be for a disk -- i.e, > storing the actual files, and not a plain image of the disk. There's > probably little point if you're going to gzip it anyway. It would > involve replacing SamDOS/MasterDOS functions somehow, though. I don't think that idea would really work, to be honest... for this to be suitable as a primary storage system you would still, somehow, need to store all the infomation that currently is in the sam's directory entry rather than the file itself - ie type, loading address, execution address etc. Also, you'd probably find that most software didn't know how to access your new system. Only programs which actually use SamDOS and BASIC to load files are likely to work, and thy're pretty few and far between. Pretty much all commercial games use their own bootstrap loader, so they wouldn't work. There are also quite a lot of sensible utilities which rely on working with the known format of a Sam disk, such as Ian's "less" and Stefan Drissen's MOD player. Besides, the whole point of an emulator is to have it work, as far as possible, in exactly the same way that the real hardware works. That means that we should expect to use disk images for file storage, rather than having some magical external file store gubbins. What *might* be a good idea, would be to add a feature to SimCoupe's menus (ie. in dialogue boxes, NOT from within the emulation) which would allow you to transfer files between the current .dsk and the host filesystem. There are already seperate programs which do this, but something integrated would probably be more intuative. Andrew -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From imc@comlab.ox.ac.uk Wed Jul 14 10:31:32 1999 Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 10:31:32 +0100 From: Ian Collier To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Message-ID: <19990714103132.A15920@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mail-Followup-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no References: <19990714023314.45738.qmail@hotmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.1i In-Reply-To: <19990714023314.45738.qmail@hotmail.com>; from Simon Cooke on Tue, Jul 13, 1999 at 07:34:01PM -0700 Status: RO Content-Length: 354 Lines: 8 On Tue, Jul 13, 1999 at 07:34:01PM -0700, Simon Cooke wrote: > The current format has no concept of sector > addressing, it doesn't know about different length sectors. I was under the impression that the format used for Amstrad disks could do that. Bickbow. Then again, we might have had this conversation already. imc From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Wed Jul 14 11:28:53 1999 From: "Si Owen" To: Subject: Re: SAM disk formats (was: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP) Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 11:26:56 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 In-Reply-To: <19990714103132.A15920@comlab.ox.ac.uk> X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO X-Status: A Content-Length: 1399 Lines: 28 > On Tue, Jul 13, 1999 at 07:34:01PM -0700, Simon Cooke wrote: > > The current format has no concept of sector addressing, it > > doesn't know about different length sectors. Ian Collier then wrote: > I was under the impression that the format used for Amstrad disks could do > that. Bickbow. Then again, we might have had this conversation already. What he says is still true in that the current format (DSK) has no concept of sector addressing. SimCoupe does _need_ an additional format of some sort to be able to describe every possibly physical disk that works on a real SAM. I never did track down a definitive spec for the Amstrad format(s) (anyone know where I can find it?). I got to the stage where I was looking through source code to try and work it out, and only found out that it stored status values for certain actions, which is something I do too. If the format is sufficient to cover the SAM floppy controller (as there are things that can be done on the Amstrad that aren't possible on the SAM, and possible vice versa) then I'd agree that it's best to use that. The new format is certainly not set in stone as nobody else has a version that uses it, and only Aley has seen a/the proposed format described, so far. I have a few disks (Lemmings, Prince of Persia, ...) in that format that I use to play them, but they can easily be converted if the format is changed. Si From imc@comlab.ox.ac.uk Wed Jul 14 12:14:35 1999 Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 12:14:35 +0100 From: Ian Collier To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: SAM disk formats (was: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP) Message-ID: <19990714121433.B15920@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mail-Followup-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no References: <19990714103132.A15920@comlab.ox.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.1i In-Reply-To: ; from Si Owen on Wed, Jul 14, 1999 at 11:26:56AM +0100 Status: RO Content-Length: 262 Lines: 9 On Wed, Jul 14, 1999 at 11:26:56AM +0100, Si Owen wrote: > I never did track down a definitive spec for the Amstrad format(s) (anyone > know where I can find it?). http://andercheran.aiind.upv.es/~amstrad/File_Formats/ Now I've seen it I'm not so sure... imc From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Wed Jul 14 18:23:04 1999 From: "Si Owen" To: Subject: RE: SAM disk formats (was: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP) Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 18:16:12 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 In-Reply-To: <19990714121433.B15920@comlab.ox.ac.uk> X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1612 Lines: 35 Ian Collier wrote: > http://andercheran.aiind.upv.es/~amstrad/File_Formats/ Ah, thanks! > Now I've seen it I'm not so sure... It's pretty close but I'm not sure it's quite there either... The Amstrad controller seems to have 2 status registers for each data read command, but the SAM only has one for the actual data read. The SAM also has a status value returned as part of the READ_ADDRESS command, and I'm not sure that it's equivalent to the other Amstrad status value. The SAM READ_ADDRESS command can be used without ever having to use a READ_SECTORX command so the status value needs to be kept separate. In fact, it's possible to have a sector with a CRC error in the ID field header, which is distinct from a CRC error in the data block, so it's something that needs to be preserved. The extended Amstrad format also copes with copy protected software specifying 8K sectors, which is a clever hack since a track is only about 6K long. I'm not sure the SAM motor can be switched off on demand to be able to manage to create it (anyone tried?), but it'd be another consideration for the format needed. The extended format is also a lot more compact and gets rid of a lot of the unnecessary baggage that's in the original format for legacy support. So, if the 2 Amstrad status values are equivalent to the SAM's READ_ADDRESS and READ_SECTORX values we should be able to use the same format. If the 8K sector hack is possible on the SAM we need the extended format to be able to cover that possibility too (if it _is_ possible and SimCoupe can't handle it then someone's bound to use it!). Si From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Wed Jul 14 21:50:02 1999 Message-ID: Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 21:44:25 +0100 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no From: Stuart Brady Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP In-Reply-To: <19990714023314.45738.qmail@hotmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike (32) Trial Version 3.05 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO X-Status: A Content-Length: 4750 Lines: 106 Simon Cooke wrote: >"He might be attempting to make the win32 version better than the others"? >SO WHAT? Oh no... that's a Microsoft tactic, isn't it, so there /can't/ be anything wrong with it... If you're wondering what I'm babbling on about, it might happen to have something to do with an OS feature which was fully implemented in Office just *one* day after the standard was announced. (OLE, was it? I can't really remember...) Oh, and Microsoft didn't let DR DOS programmers have any betas of MS DOS, did they? I suppose that once you have the majority of the market share for operating systems, and most of those customers use Office, you've got a license to print money, really. >1. He's still working on it. He really should consider releasing the source code whilst he's working on it, so that the Linux and DOS versions have a chance to catch up. >2. It's under GPL; therefore it'll be released as source code anyway, so you >can do a backport if you like. If he doesn't release it whilst he's working on it, that will take longer, and the Win32 version will be better for longer. I also think that Linux programmers shouldn't go off and improve programs for long periods of time without releasing the code. They don't, though. >3. It's his time and effort. It's up to him how he spends it. As you'll have >the source, you can spend the time backporting it if you like. That's true. I'm not going to argue with that. But he *could* release the source code after getting the basics done. >4. The only person who knows what he's doing on it is Simon himself. That's the problem. At least a todo list and some changelogs would be better than nothing. >And heaven forbid that I should take Simon's Win32 port, and add a debugger >API to it, and have my win32 assembler system talk to it through that. After >all, it wouldn't work on Linux. So we can't do it! >"Then again, Windows programmers are all alike -- they've got no respect for >other platforms." >Sounds like I could say the same about Stuart Brady... no respect for other >platforms. What the hell are you going on about? I've got no respect for MS DOS and Windows *only* programmers (and that includes myself a few years ago) -- not "other platforms". Then again, I suppose "other platforms" means Windows to any Microsoft employee, because the only OSes they've ever heard of are Windows and Linux. And, from what I've seen on CSS, Gate's didn't even mention Linux or /any/ non-intel platforms in his book. Try telling me that Microsoft aims to release programs on as many operating systems as possible without lying. And without using strange definitions of "as many operating systems as possible". I /do/ have respect for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Amiga, Sam, Spectrum, Atari, Macintosh, Irix, Solaris (does MS still use this for hotmail?), BeOS, RiscOS, EPOC32, GNU Hurd, and users. If they use Windows as well as one of these (as I do), they're not quite as bad. I'm still lame for using Windows, though. I respect the fact that people may want to use DOS -- and I will always release my source code so that people can port it to other operating systems. Microsoft on the other hand... hmm... Ever heard of the DR-DOS test? And what's this FUD thing that I keep hearing about? >Why not just wait and see what happens? >Also: the DSK format has NOT been modified. It'll still be the same. There >will, however, be ANOTHER format that can correctly represent >protected/non-standard disks. The current format has no concept of sector >addressing, it doesn't know about different length sectors. So it can handle >standard disks, and that's it. That's not sufficient. Fair enough. Btw, I'm /really/ sorry for flaming Si Owen... Aley had just pissed me off a bit by flaming me directly for "not helping" when I had better things to do. I'm still a bit annoyed now. I do, however, urge Si Owen to release the code, no matter how buggy or incomplete it is. I was under the impression that he was waiting until he'd got the basics working first, but he seems to be well past that stage, if he's thinking about disk image formats. Have you got any good reason not to release it, Si? If you think that it's incomplete... If we all followed that logic, OSS wouldn't exist, ID would never have finished a game, Microsoft would never release anything (not that they ever do (joking, Simon)), chip manufactures would never finish their designs, and to put it simply, nothing would /ever/ be done on time, if at all. I'm just asking you: where _exactly_ are you going to draw the line, Si? Not releasing the source code when developing is something that simply isn't done with OSS. Until now, anyway. -- Stuart Brady From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 10:27:44 1999 Message-Id: <002d01becea0$f3a30930$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: <02JQLBATJkh3EwJl@wholehog.demon.co.uk> <37866536.1515@clara.net> <006a01becc47$e3040b70$7b51c29e@inf.upol.cz> <378A6433.AE10C70E@btinternet.com> Subject: Re: Searching for screen converter Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 11:03:48 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1056 Lines: 26 > > PCX is compressed, so it *can* be smaller than BMP. > > Should save quite a bit with the usual SAM graphics, especially since > you are going to need 12 palette changes to go over the single pixel > encoding limit. > > Just by the way (and my reason for posting), you are aware that some PC > paint programs have problems with pcx encoded RLE runs over 32 pixels, > while others are fine? I don't know what the PCX format officially > allows (for those who don't know, there is bit room to store a run > length of 63), but this might become an issue . . . > > -Thomas I Neither program my own PCX code, nor do some strange mirroring of lines (as somebody described for BMP). I just use the existing PCX/BMP routines. So I don't know much about it. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 10:27:45 1999 Message-Id: <003b01becea1$ad959330$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: Subject: Re: SAM disk formats Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 11:09:00 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from QUOTED-PRINTABLE to 8bit by mail.comlab.ox.ac.uk id KAA25892 Status: RO Content-Length: 2549 Lines: 62 ----- Original Message ----- From: Si Owen To: Sent: 14. července 1999 12:26 Subject: Re: SAM disk formats (was: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP) > > On Tue, Jul 13, 1999 at 07:34:01PM -0700, Simon Cooke wrote: > > > The current format has no concept of sector addressing, it > > > doesn't know about different length sectors. > > Ian Collier then wrote: > > I was under the impression that the format used for Amstrad disks could do > > that. Bickbow. Then again, we might have had this conversation already. > > What he says is still true in that the current format (DSK) has no concept > of sector addressing. SimCoupe does _need_ an additional format of some > sort to be able to describe every possibly physical disk that works on a > real SAM. > > I never did track down a definitive spec for the Amstrad format(s) (anyone > know where I can find it?). I got to the stage where I was looking through > source code to try and work it out, and only found out that it stored status > values for certain actions, which is something I do too. If the format is > sufficient to cover the SAM floppy controller (as there are things that can > be done on the Amstrad that aren't possible on the SAM, and possible vice > versa) then I'd agree that it's best to use that. > > The new format is certainly not set in stone as nobody else has a version > that uses it, and only Aley has seen a/the proposed format described, so > far. I have a few disks (Lemmings, Prince of Persia, ...) in that format > that I use to play them, but they can easily be converted if the format is > changed. > > Si Well, I think the new Si's format doesn't seem to be bad. So I think we don't need the Amstrad's format, since it is as little standard as Si's one (none). Especially when there is no publicly available specification, it cannot be a standard. And I ask, why do we need some Amstrad files? I think in this particular situation, there is no reason why don't use Si's new format. Maybe it is not the best one, but it works (probably - I haven't seen it :))) As Si wrote, I have the specification of his nerw fileformat, but I haven't seen it in real, since Si didn't send me the SimCoupe (terrible situation.....). ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 10:47:59 1999 Message-Id: <007501becea4$2d6e3bf0$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 11:26:53 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 4227 Lines: 94 > The way I see it, Aley doesn't want to make any new file formats that > people don't like. Aley's also discussing the type of compression to be > used before implementing it. Aley added sad support, but there's > absolutely nothing wrong with adding support for a file format which was > written when nobody was around to discuss it. > > Si, on the other hand, has modified the dsk format without telling > anyone (and I really hope he hasn't done anything else). All I have to > say is: get the basics working first, then add the extra functionality > *AFTER* you've released the source code. I really hoped Si wouldn't do > this, but it seems that I was wrong, and that he might be attempting to > make the Win32 version better than the others. As Si wrote, you simply missed the point. DSK format is still DSK, since DSK is taken from Linux, so it cannot be compressed or changed. The same is SAD. It cannot be compressed, since it must be compatible with other programs w/SAD support. As I wrote, I preffer standard ZIP compression, we can use zip32.dll in Win32, and public external ZIP/UNZIP (available as GPL program) in DOS and Linux. I have seen this in ZX32 and I like it. > Then again, Windows programmers are all alike -- they've got no respect > for other platforms. DOS programmers are about as bad, too: "Go and get > DOS because it's the right STANDARD!!!!" -- if we listened to that sort > of advice, we'd all be living in trees. Oh no! a) I preffer better Win32 SimCoupe, than worse one. :))) b) It is still easier to get a DOS than to remake all DOS-only programs for your Linux (or what you use). But this is common to all platforms: If you ask anybody to convert his Amiga/Sony PSX/Win32/DOS/ZX Spectrum/..... program, he simply says go and get that machine/op.system. That isn't wrong. Most programmers don't have sufficient resources to make everything Linux-friendly. And they have no reason, since they don't have money from you. And when most prgorams you want use are Win32 ones, you may think Win32 programmers are satans..... ;-) But the situation is not as bad..... > >Regardless the file formats, we could add ZIP support to SimCoupe. > > Please could you use zlib, with gnuzip files? You'll end up with similar > (possibly slightly smaller) file sizes, that way. > > Btw, the *extentions* can be anything you like, such as saz/sad.gz > (gzipped sad), dsz/dsk.gz (gzipped dsk), and sdz/sd.gz. clear? Try not > to use zip or gz as a single extention, though. You are always able to read the contents of an archive, so it can have any extension, but I really preffer hte original one (packed SAD will be still SAD). Also, I STRONGLY recommend ZIP, not GZip. Also, extension must be max.3 chars long (for DOS users). > I'm wondering how good a zip/tar.gz format would be for a disk -- i.e, > storing the actual files, and not a plain image of the disk. There's > probably little point if you're going to gzip it anyway. It would > involve replacing SamDOS/MasterDOS functions somehow, though. Why? > Use zlib, and you can do it internally. At least people won't have to > download gzip and install it. If you were to do it externally, I don't > think deleting the original compressed file (after uncompressing it for > use with simcoupe) would be a very good idea. Understand that the file > "image.dsk" might already exist, and be different to the one you're > inflating. ZIPped files are available via Internet. We don't need GZip, we don't want it!!!!! I know that it has better compression ratio, but who cares??? A few bytes or kilobytes. We just need the ZIP support, it's the most compatible method and its compression is much better than storing plain images. Also, internal ZIPping is possible, as well as internal GZipping. > Btw, I've got an idea: you could treat the floppy as a ramdisk, and load > and save images to it -- that would only be optional, of course. What? ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 10:48:00 1999 Message-ID: <0AEF0EB21F09D211AE4E0080C82733BF851B67@mailhost.aculab.com> From: Justin Skists To: "'sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no'" Subject: RE: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 10:48:02 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2232.9) Content-Type: text/plain X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 2089 Lines: 45 Stuart Brady wrote: >I do, however, urge Si Owen to release the code, no matter how buggy or >incomplete it is. I was under the impression that he was waiting until >he'd got the basics working first, but he seems to be well past that >stage, if he's thinking about disk image formats. Have you got any good >reason not to release it, Si? (This isn't directed at Stuart - but to the whole list) I think people should be more cautious in demanding the release of the win32 port source. In fact, I'm impressed Si Owen is still doing it. If I was doing the port: after reading all the posts on this matter, I would've lost my temper by now, scrapped all changes to the code and send a post on here in the spirit of "Sod this for a game of marbles, someone else do the friggin port! I've had enough." Oh dear.. I think I'm going to get flamed for all that. Oh well... As for the OS wars, calm down... It's not Simon Cooke's fault for all Microsoft stuff. Niether it is ANY Microsoft engineer's fault. If any of you lot know what it's like to work in a commercial software development environment, then you know it's not the engineers that make the decisions - It's the effing managment!!!! It's the management that want the money. It's the management that decide what gets released on what platform, when it gets released and whether or not it's ready to be released in the first place!!!!!!! The amount of times I've been involved in project where I think it's best to implement something one way only to be overturned by someone else amazes me. In fact, I'm still waiting for a decision from higher management whether I should be porting my driver to Digital Unix 4.0D or Compaq Tru64 4.0F. My opinion (as with my project leader's opinion) is that we should go for the latest. Until then, I'm stuck writing test utilities... I'm sure that if it was up to the engineers in Microsoft, then they would try to make the software as perfect as possible for ALL platforms. But it's a f***ing business out there - Programmers no longer have control!!! Thank you, and good night. Justin. From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 11:12:15 1999 X-sendmail-revision: 29-Mar-1999 (23) by ant@tissoft.co.uk Message-ID: <001c01becea1$e8c8c1c0$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> From: "Nick Humphries" To: Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 10:10:40 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 4941 Lines: 131 From: Stuart Brady >Simon Cooke wrote: > >>"He might be attempting to make the win32 version better than the others"? > >>SO WHAT? > >Oh no... that's a Microsoft tactic, isn't it, so there /can't/ be >anything wrong with it... Innovation is a good thing. Speaking as a programmer, I know that simply porting programs is very unsatisfying because you're simply twiddling with someone else's work. If I was meant to be doing this in my spare time, I'd want to enjoy it, and I'd probably put a few new things in as well. >>1. He's still working on it. > >He really should consider releasing the source code whilst he's working >on it, so that the Linux and DOS versions have a chance to catch up. So you're saying that people write bug-free code the first time they write it? Dream on. Surely it's better that he gets everything he's working on working and stable? (building castles on rocks instead of sand, and all that) Get the bugs out of the way now rather than cause problems later. >>2. It's under GPL; therefore it'll be released as source code anyway, so you >>can do a backport if you like. > >If he doesn't release it whilst he's working on it, that will take >longer, and the Win32 version will be better for longer. I also think >that Linux programmers shouldn't go off and improve programs for long >periods of time without releasing the code. They don't, though. See (1). >>3. It's his time and effort. It's up to him how he spends it. As you'll have >>the source, you can spend the time backporting it if you like. > >That's true. I'm not going to argue with that. But he *could* release >the source code after getting the basics done. See (1). >>4. The only person who knows what he's doing on it is Simon himself. > >That's the problem. At least a todo list and some changelogs would be >better than nothing. Not an unreasonable request, although Si's under no obligation to do so. And there's no reason why he shouldn't wait until he's done his bit before doing that either. >>"Then again, Windows programmers are all alike -- they've got no respect for >>other platforms." > >>Sounds like I could say the same about Stuart Brady... no respect for other >>platforms. > >What the hell are you going on about? I've got no respect for MS DOS and >Windows *only* programmers (and that includes myself a few years ago) -- I take it you're not in the programming industry? >>Why not just wait and see what happens? > >>Also: the DSK format has NOT been modified. It'll still be the same. There >>will, however, be ANOTHER format that can correctly represent >>protected/non-standard disks. The current format has no concept of sector >>addressing, it doesn't know about different length sectors. So it can handle >>standard disks, and that's it. That's not sufficient. > >Fair enough. > >Btw, I'm /really/ sorry for flaming Si Owen... Aley had just pissed me >off a bit by flaming me directly for "not helping" when I had better >things to do. I'm still a bit annoyed now. So you had a go at Si? Makes sense... >I do, however, urge Si Owen to release the code, no matter how buggy or >incomplete it is. What use is that to any future programmer? It's bloody difficult to develop someone else's alpha code because you don't know if any bugs discovered were as a result of the original programmer's coding or any changes you did after that. Getting Si to complete his bit first before releasing the code will save a LOT of trouble and hassle in future. Besides, say he DID release his code right now. You'd port some of the changes (some of which probably won't be stable at this point). Si then finishes his bit and releases the code. Chances are you'd have to port the same section of code again as it's been changed. Why not wait? Where's the hurry? It's not as if there's a deadline or anything. >I was under the impression that he was waiting until >he'd got the basics working first, but he seems to be well past that >stage, if he's thinking about disk image formats. Have you got any good >reason not to release it, Si? It would make sense for a programming, when porting stuff and making iprovements along the way, to add the improvements when he can, rather than wait until the end of the project. That way, the details of the part of the program which he's improving are still fresh in his memory. So, it's entirely possible that Si's done a few improvements in one part of the program, yet hasn't done the porting in another part of it, making it unreleaseable at this point. You say you're a programmer, Stuart, yet here I am teaching you the very basics of program development... If you just sat down and thought a little before flying off the handle, you'd have a reasonably good guess as to what's really going on. Nick. From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 11:12:40 1999 Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 10:50:23 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Collier X-Sender: asc25@red.csi.cam.ac.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 2803 Lines: 69 On Wed, 14 Jul 1999, Stuart Brady wrote: > >1. He's still working on it. > > He really should consider releasing the source code whilst he's working > on it, so that the Linux and DOS versions have a chance to catch up. I notice you didn't mention the MacOS version.... Anyway, as we have discussed before, until he releases the binary there is *no* obligation to release the source, and frankly I don't think overheated, sarcastic messages like that one are very likely to change his mind. > that Linux programmers shouldn't go off and improve programs for long > periods of time without releasing the code. They don't, though. Oh, you reckon they don't, do you? > >4. The only person who knows what he's doing on it is Simon himself. > > That's the problem. At least a todo list and some changelogs would be > better than nothing. Personally I'd rather he spend time coding, than writing up useless documantation. And (I'm playing devil's advocate here, slightly) what makes you think it is any of your business how Simon chooses to spend his time? > >"Then again, Windows programmers are all alike -- they've got no respect for > >other platforms." > > >Sounds like I could say the same about Stuart Brady... no respect for other > >platforms. > > What the hell are you going on about? I've got no respect for MS DOS and > Windows *only* programmers (and that includes myself a few years ago) -- > not "other platforms". Then again, I suppose "other platforms" means > Windows to any Microsoft employee, because the only OSes they've ever > heard of are Windows and Linux. And, from what I've seen on CSS, Gate's > didn't even mention Linux or /any/ non-intel platforms in his book. In context, "other platforms" DOES mean Windows. It's fairly obvious you have no respect for that platform - and I'm not talking about the programmers. Or the users. And Microsoft do at least release some Macintosh products. > Btw, I'm /really/ sorry for flaming Si Owen... Aley had just pissed me > off a bit by flaming me directly for "not helping" when I had better > things to do. I'm still a bit annoyed now. Please don't flame people just because you think someone else has been annoying. Preferably keep flames off the mailing list (and yes, I realise I'm being a complete hypocrite by saying that.... but at least I only reply in kind to the persons directly responsible) > Not releasing the source code when developing is something that simply > isn't done with OSS. Until now, anyway. Good grief, I wish my world worked as smoothly as yours seems to. Andrew -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 11:12:40 1999 Message-Id: <00f201becea8$768926c0$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 11:57:34 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 4197 Lines: 106 > Stuart Brady wrote: > > >1. He's still working on it. > > He really should consider releasing the source code whilst he's working > on it, so that the Linux and DOS versions have a chance to catch up. We (DOS/Linux) are already LOST! :-( I think Si could release a beta version (with or without sources). Maybe WITH sources, since I have something little to add. > >2. It's under GPL; therefore it'll be released as source code anyway, so you > >can do a backport if you like. > > If he doesn't release it whilst he's working on it, that will take > longer, and the Win32 version will be better for longer. I also think > that Linux programmers shouldn't go off and improve programs for long > periods of time without releasing the code. They don't, though. Yes, they usually don't. Also, without project documentation, we are all lost! > >3. It's his time and effort. It's up to him how he spends it. As you'll have > >the source, you can spend the time backporting it if you like. > > That's true. I'm not going to argue with that. But he *could* release > the source code after getting the basics done. I think we could cooperate on SimCoupe rather than "at first Si does hit work, than you will convert it to Linux and do your work, than Si will convert it back to Win32 and do his work". Simon, your strategy is bad! COOPERATION is the key to success! > >4. The only person who knows what he's doing on it is Simon himself. > > That's the problem. At least a todo list and some changelogs would be > better than nothing. I think so. > >Sounds like I could say the same about Stuart Brady... no respect for other > >platforms. > > I /do/ have respect for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Amiga, Sam, > Spectrum, Atari, Macintosh, Irix, Solaris (does MS still use this for > hotmail?), BeOS, RiscOS, EPOC32, GNU Hurd, and system here> users. If they use Windows as well as one of these (as I > do), they're not quite as bad. I'm still lame for using Windows, though. And what is your respect good for? You are a typical anti-Gates man. Do you all know why we still talk about op.systems, instead of SimCoupe? Since Si works on his own. That's the problem. If Si will stop working on his own, we can stop talking about this strange Microsoft stuff, and go onto SimCoupe. > Btw, I'm /really/ sorry for flaming Si Owen... Aley had just pissed me > off a bit by flaming me directly for "not helping" when I had better > things to do. I'm still a bit annoyed now. The problem is that I wanted an answer to my question. And you (although out of time) wrote something "answer-to-different-quesiton". And that's I don't like. I don't want you to serve me, but I suppose when I ask "How much is 2+2?" then "Re: ..." mail will contain "2+2=4" and nothing like "I have seen 3+4=7". That's it. I asked for Sam->PC converter for DOS/Win platform. And what I've got is PC->Sam converters for Sam. Also, I've get nearly BMP specification. That's all I don't need. !!!!! > I do, however, urge Si Owen to release the code, no matter how buggy or > incomplete it is. I was under the impression that he was waiting until > he'd got the basics working first, but he seems to be well past that > stage, if he's thinking about disk image formats. Have you got any good > reason not to release it, Si? > > If you think that it's incomplete... If we all followed that logic, OSS > wouldn't exist, ID would never have finished a game, Microsoft would > never release anything (not that they ever do (joking, Simon)), chip Micro... :-))) > manufactures would never finish their designs, and to put it simply, > nothing would /ever/ be done on time, if at all. I'm just asking you: > where _exactly_ are you going to draw the line, Si? > > Not releasing the source code when developing is something that simply > isn't done with OSS. Until now, anyway. > -- > Stuart Brady > ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 11:12:40 1999 Message-Id: <022901beceaa$3cdea920$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: <2164EF067AC1D011BEDE0040052FA539A885D0@exchange.climax.co.uk> Subject: Re: Enigma Variations II. Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 12:10:16 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 2389 Lines: 65 > Look at details: > --------- > Defenders - graphics reasonable, > > ..actually, i thought the graphics in defenders were some of the best ever > seen on the sam, > and don't forget when we did defenders there was not one single game out ! Yes, Defenders is very old. Maybe the first one. The graphics doesn't look absolutely bad, but it is not brilliant. I think. > music only 3 channel mono (why?), > > ..you've had the sam now for 8 years, we'd had it for a week when we started > defenders, i think the music > driver was knocked up over a weekend with almost no documentation by a guy > called sean conran! > ..it's a miracle it had any sound at all ! ;o) (i wonder what he's upto > these dayz....) Alright. I don't want to beat you. (Are you the author?) I just think Defenders is about nothing. Maybe it is old, and it was hadr work to do, but this cannot change the situation. Do you think Manic Miner has brilliant graphics? I think no. And if you say "it is very old" you are right, but compared with Dan Dare III or Savage it simply looks badly. > playability none > > can't argue with that ! ;o) ..really there was no time, it was just a matter > of get it out the door as > quick as possible, we had lousy bosses and that's how we had to work. The > thing with coding > is that the playability part is the last bit that gets tweaked after all the > technical stuff is done, > some bosses just look at the screen, go 'that's pretty' and think it's done > (coz they never play > stuff themselves) fortunately things are better now (get the time i need) > ..i could still do with > longer, but it's not as bad as it used to be ! I must say again: No playability. As I can see in british magazines (incl. Fred, Your Sinclair etc.) british people don't look to the playability much. e.g. Terminator II is one of the worst games ever made, and it got a very high percentage score. etc... This is not only my idea, you can find articles about this "feature" of british game-magazines in several "official" game-magazines, at least those ones not sponsored by game sellers. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 11:29:41 1999 Message-Id: <024401beceaa$a313d260$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: <2164EF067AC1D011BEDE0040052FA539A88753@exchange.climax.co.uk> Subject: Re: Enigma Variations Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 12:13:08 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from QUOTED-PRINTABLE to 8bit by mail.comlab.ox.ac.uk id LAA27435 Status: RO Content-Length: 1458 Lines: 44 ----- Original Message ----- From: Rob Holman To: Sent: 29. června 1999 12:06 Subject: RE: Enigma Variations > So how long have you been around sam-users then? > > > just the last 4 days ! :o) > > ...did a search for sam things in a moment of boredom the other day, and was > surprised to find an active list ! I didn't think anyone would remember the > sam, > let alone be writing emulators and stuff for it ! :o) > > ..i've been in 3d Playstation/PC land for the last 4 years working at > Team 17 on a mario-esque platform game called P.i.G, but have recently > relocated to the south (for a whole load of reasons.....) to work for > Climax. > I've just finished a realtime I.K. system with Skinning for PSX and i'm now > spending a month or two chilling out, finishing off a Gameboy project as a > favour for someone ! > > (i think that's why i was looking at sam stuff having suddenly being thrust > back into z80 land, which is something i've not used for years and years, > takes a while to get back into after lots of hardware and 'C' !) > > rob :o) Does it mean Gameboy has something to do with Z80? ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 11:29:42 1999 Message-Id: <025301beceab$20c47cf0$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: <0AEF0EB21F09D211AE4E0080C82733BF851B67@mailhost.aculab.com> Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 12:16:39 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1414 Lines: 34 > Stuart Brady wrote: > > >I do, however, urge Si Owen to release the code, no matter how buggy or > >incomplete it is. I was under the impression that he was waiting until > >he'd got the basics working first, but he seems to be well past that > >stage, if he's thinking about disk image formats. Have you got any good > >reason not to release it, Si? > > (This isn't directed at Stuart - but to the whole list) > > I think people should be more cautious in demanding the release of the win32 > port source. In fact, I'm impressed Si Owen is still doing it. > > If I was doing the port: after reading all the posts on this matter, I > would've lost my temper by now, scrapped all changes to the code and > send a post on here in the spirit of "Sod this for a game of marbles, > someone else do the friggin port! I've had enough." I think this is a normal situation. If something is about to happen (Win32 SimCoupe), but no official information (source) is available, people are getting silly. That's normal. People are talking about that, and all of them will stop as soon as official release time will come. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 11:41:46 1999 Message-Id: <025c01becead$36c6e0e0$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: <001c01becea1$e8c8c1c0$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 12:31:35 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 4450 Lines: 117 > From: Stuart Brady > > >>1. He's still working on it. > > > >He really should consider releasing the source code whilst he's working > >on it, so that the Linux and DOS versions have a chance to catch up. > > So you're saying that people write bug-free code the first time they write it? > Dream on. Surely it's better that he gets everything he's working on working and > stable? (building castles on rocks instead of sand, and all that) Get the bugs > out of the way now rather than cause problems later. THAT'S THE POINT! > >>4. The only person who knows what he's doing on it is Simon himself. > > > >That's the problem. At least a todo list and some changelogs would be > >better than nothing. > > Not an unreasonable request, although Si's under no obligation to do so. And > there's no reason why he shouldn't wait until he's done his bit before doing > that either. If you want to document something, you cannot do it after 4 months of a programming. You can't remember what you did for that long time. I think Si could (should?) do complete documentation thru his work. Not after. When I work on something, I simply must document everything, so I think it is a normal in praxis. At least for programs which are supposed to be improved in the future we need some (good) documentation. I'm not talking about user's guide, I do talk about documentation. > >I do, however, urge Si Owen to release the code, no matter how buggy or > >incomplete it is. > > What use is that to any future programmer? It's bloody difficult to develop > someone else's alpha code because you don't know if any bugs discovered were as > a result of the original programmer's coding or any changes you did after that. > Getting Si to complete his bit first before releasing the code will save a LOT > of trouble and hassle in future. SimCoupe is a modular program. So people can work parallely on it. When I look what you wrote above, I think you probably haven't seen any larger program. Or do you really think all programs have been made by one single person??? (imagine space ships software...) > Besides, say he DID release his code right now. You'd port some of the changes > (some of which probably won't be stable at this point). Si then finishes his bit > and releases the code. Chances are you'd have to port the same section of code > again as it's been changed. Why not wait? Where's the hurry? It's not as if > there's a deadline or anything. This is "virtual reality". How often this can happen to SimCoupe? (hint: How often did this happen in the past, when Allan Skillman released his alphas and betas?) > >I was under the impression that he was waiting until > >he'd got the basics working first, but he seems to be well past that > >stage, if he's thinking about disk image formats. Have you got any good > >reason not to release it, Si? > > It would make sense for a programming, when porting stuff and making iprovements > along the way, to add the improvements when he can, rather than wait until the > end of the project. That way, the details of the part of the program which he's > improving are still fresh in his memory. So, it's entirely possible that Si's > done a few improvements in one part of the program, yet hasn't done the porting > in another part of it, making it unreleaseable at this point. You go into "possibilities". Get back into reality and stop talk abut things you can't know. Also, I don't want to make any ports of SimCoupe, I just want to add my code to it. I won't work on the same places as Si does, so where is the problem. You are still talking about porting betas, but this is not the case. Stuart Brady wants the sources for ?something?, but other people just want to do a beta testing, and they possibly can find some bugs in the source. > You say you're a programmer, Stuart, yet here I am teaching you the very basics > of program development... If you just sat down and thought a little before > flying off the handle, you'd have a reasonably good guess as to what's really > going on. > > > Nick. btw. Nick Humphries, Don't you make something for Sam in the past? ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 11:41:48 1999 Message-Id: <026301beceae$13800160$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 12:37:45 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1343 Lines: 37 From: Andrew Collier > > >4. The only person who knows what he's doing on it is Simon himself. > > > > That's the problem. At least a todo list and some changelogs would be > > better than nothing. > > Personally I'd rather he spend time coding, than writing up useless > documantation. And (I'm playing devil's advocate here, slightly) what > makes you think it is any of your business how Simon chooses to spend his > time? What? Useless documentation??? Remember: DOCUMENTATION OS NEVER USELESS!!! This applies to the long-term projects as SimCoupe, when many people want to work on it. Please read some books on software engineering, there you can see some statistics from 60's-80's concerning on this fenomena. Probably you will surprised how necessary documentation is. > > Not releasing the source code when developing is something that simply > > isn't done with OSS. Until now, anyway. > > Good grief, I wish my world worked as smoothly as yours seems to. > > Andrew Guys, where can I buy your worlds? ;) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 12:00:13 1999 Subject: Re: Enigma Variations To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 11:45:55 +0100 (BST) In-Reply-To: <024401beceaa$a313d260$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> from "Aley Keprt" at Jul 15, 99 12:13:08 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: From: Andrew Gale X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 301 Lines: 13 > Does it mean Gameboy has something to do with Z80? > The gameboy processor is based on the Z80, but it has no IY, or IX instructions, no in/out ports, and it has a few extra instructions. If you're interested, have a look at: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Peaks/3938/z80gboy.txt -Andy From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 12:00:13 1999 Message-Id: <028201beceaf$72872250$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: <007601bec3c8$07fd5130$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a - Sound emulation Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 12:47:34 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 999 Lines: 26 > Well, you could make installation a hell of a lot easier by not asking the user > to find and install various external programs before you can get SimCoupe > running. It's bad enough that you have to find, download and install the sound > chip driver. IMHO everything should be in a single install set, and ideally as a > single program. > > Nick Humphries. No, that's wrong. I though it is a pretty clear why SAA1099 emulation is in separate package. 1.) I worked on sound, Allan worked on SimCoupe. New versions came paralelly. This is faster. 2.) My sound emulation isn't concerned into SimCoupe. It is publicly usable in any SAA1099 interested software. So I publish it in its own package. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 12:13:46 1999 X-sendmail-revision: 29-Mar-1999 (23) by ant@tissoft.co.uk Message-ID: <008701beceb2$1d5c95a0$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> From: "Nick Humphries" To: Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 12:06:40 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 4251 Lines: 104 From: Aley Keprt >> From: Stuart Brady >> >> >>1. He's still working on it. >> > >> >He really should consider releasing the source code whilst he's working >> >on it, so that the Linux and DOS versions have a chance to catch up. >> >> So you're saying that people write bug-free code the first time they write >it? >> Dream on. Surely it's better that he gets everything he's working on >working and >> stable? (building castles on rocks instead of sand, and all that) Get the >bugs >> out of the way now rather than cause problems later. > >THAT'S THE POINT! Then why not wait for Si to finish his bit? >> >I do, however, urge Si Owen to release the code, no matter how buggy or >> >incomplete it is. >> >> What use is that to any future programmer? It's bloody difficult to >develop >> someone else's alpha code because you don't know if any bugs discovered >were as >> a result of the original programmer's coding or any changes you did after >that. >> Getting Si to complete his bit first before releasing the code will save a >LOT >> of trouble and hassle in future. > >SimCoupe is a modular program. So people can work parallely on it. >When I look what you wrote above, I think you probably haven't seen >any larger program. Or do you really think all programs have been made >by one single person??? (imagine space ships software...) Well, you think wrong about me there, VERY wrong. However, if Si's not working on any modules that affect your module, then why does it matter how long it takes him to do his stuff? You can do your stuff, he can do his, where's the problem? If Si's bit DOES affect you, then wait patiently for it to be done. >> >I was under the impression that he was waiting until >> >he'd got the basics working first, but he seems to be well past that >> >stage, if he's thinking about disk image formats. Have you got any good >> >reason not to release it, Si? >> >> It would make sense for a programming, when porting stuff and making >iprovements >> along the way, to add the improvements when he can, rather than wait until >the >> end of the project. That way, the details of the part of the program which >he's >> improving are still fresh in his memory. So, it's entirely possible that >Si's >> done a few improvements in one part of the program, yet hasn't done the >porting >> in another part of it, making it unreleaseable at this point. > >You go into "possibilities". Get back into reality and stop talk abut >things you can't know. The development life cycle of any program are very very similar indeed. >Also, I don't want to make any ports of SimCoupe, I just want to add my code >to it. >I won't work on the same places as Si does, so where is the problem. >You are still talking about porting betas, but this is not the case. >Stuart Brady wants the sources for ?something?, but other people just >want to do a beta testing, and they possibly can find some bugs in the >source. But it's obviously not ready yet, otherwise it would have been released. >btw. Nick Humphries, Don't you make something for Sam in the past? I wrote the odd program, sold some under the name Cursor Productions (a name I now use for anything I do related to the Speccy or SAM today (see animation at YS Rock'n'Roll Years)) - when I was writing for the SAM, sold about 20 copies of a (looking back now, crap) disc full of programs and made the princely sum of 28p (if you ignore the 10 quid I lost on a SAM Newsdisk advert when SAMCo went bust), which isn't bad considering I spent loads on disks, etc. All small scale stuff, simple games and utilities. I'll be reusing the Cursor Productions name for the Java and VRML games I'm about to write for the YSRnRY (you're going to like these...). Unfortunately I doubt I'll be able to use that name if I ever start up my own company as it's already used today :( Do NOT judge my programming ability on the SAM programs! They were written about ten years ago, since then I've got a degree and four years professional programming experience. Nick (now getting the feeling of the thrill of programming again doing stuff in Java and the like - haven't felt like that since I stopped doing stuff in SAM BASIC....) From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 12:13:47 1999 Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 12:01:51 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Collier X-Sender: asc25@red.csi.cam.ac.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP In-Reply-To: <026301beceae$13800160$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 2201 Lines: 50 On Thu, 15 Jul 1999, Aley Keprt wrote: > > > >4. The only person who knows what he's doing on it is Simon himself. > > > > > > That's the problem. At least a todo list and some changelogs would be > > > better than nothing. > > > > Personally I'd rather he spend time coding, than writing up useless > > documantation. And (I'm playing devil's advocate here, slightly) what > > makes you think it is any of your business how Simon chooses to spend his > > time? > > What? Useless documentation??? > Remember: DOCUMENTATION OS NEVER USELESS!!! > This applies to the long-term projects as SimCoupe, when many people > want to work on it. > Please read some books on software engineering, there you can see > some statistics from 60's-80's concerning on this fenomena. > Probably you will surprised how necessary documentation is. %!$$ *&& Aley - look at the context. I'm not talking about documented code, I'm talking about a "todo list and some changelogs" which _you_ were asking for. Now, tell me; what good is it to you, right now, before the work is actually released, if Si puts up a web page saying something like: "Fixed a glitch in palette changing. Windows now minimise properly. Added .dsk.gz support in dialogs. To do: fix flag bug" etc etc I'm not saying it would be useless to him, but that it would be useless to anyone else. Without the source there's nothing you can do with that sort of text, and it's just wasting Si's time keeping it presentable. I imagine he *is* keeping his own notes and docs, but it would be a waste of his time, at the moment, to write those up in such a way that others could see and understand them. Aley - don't patronise me. I know exactly why documentation is useful to the developers of a project. But I wasn't talking about that sort of documentation; and even if I was, until the source is released, you don't need the docs because you're not involved with the development of Win32 SimCoupe. Get over it. Andrew -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 13:02:24 1999 Message-Id: <02ac01beceb9$3a3a1830$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 13:57:34 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2" X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from QUOTED-PRINTABLE to 8bit by mail.comlab.ox.ac.uk id NAA29491 Status: RO Content-Length: 2797 Lines: 68 ----- Original Message ----- From: Stuart Brady To: Sent: 1. července 1999 17:45 Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a > Nick Humphries wrote: > > >Well, you could make installation a hell of a lot easier by not asking > >the user to find and install various external programs before you can > >get SimCoupe running. It's bad enough that you have to find, download > >and install the sound chip driver. IMHO everything should be in a > >single install set, and ideally as a single program. > > You can read gz files with zlib if you want to do it internally -- it's > sort of what it's for, really... > > >I disagree. It depends who you aim the emulator at. If you're going for your > >regular emulation fan, then most of them would only recognise .ZIP files or > >self-extracting EXEs. Any other type of compression (gzip, lha, arc, whatever) > >would require a more techie type of person who'd know about these less common > >(in PC-land) compressors. > > WinZip can handle gz files, and I think Zip Magic can, too. Right-click > and choose the extract option... hardly rocket science, is it? Zlib can > be used on Win32, DOS, a lot of UNIX systems, and probablly MacOS. I > *really* hope you're not thinking of placing sam disks in *DOS* > executables... that's just completely insane. > Also, I *really* hate to have to point this out, but zip's method is the > *same* as gzip's... The difference is that gzip compresses a single > file, which is all you need. Zip files would have the complication of > extracting the dsk or sad file from the archive. If there's more than > one file, which one do you use? Gzip is better for single files. End of > story. Please try to read some documentation on the subject. Most of the current Sam-related stuff at NVG and other servers is ZIPped (pk). So I preffer this way. Maybe we can include support for gzip and zip, but this only means longer code. Since GZIP is not able to pack more files together, I consider ZIP better. Imagine you have one ZIP with all Fred issues, and when you run it, emulator askes you what volume to you want. ZIP files can contain "file_id.diz" or other description .txt file. This is not possible when using gzip. (I think.) > What's wrong with zlib? Why the hell would people want to write > something new when gz is better and is easier to implement? > -- > Stuart Brady We have ZIP sources as well, and ZIP can pack multiple files. That's positive, isn't it? ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 13:02:24 1999 Message-Id: <02b301beceb9$740fb290$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: <0AEF0EB21F09D211AE4E0080C82733BF851B44@mailhost.aculab.com> Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 13:59:12 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2" X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from QUOTED-PRINTABLE to 8bit by mail.comlab.ox.ac.uk id NAA29493 Status: RO Content-Length: 740 Lines: 22 ----- Original Message ----- From: Justin Skists To: Sent: 1. července 1999 18:35 Subject: RE: New: SimCoupe 0.783a > >zip, too. They've always used zip in the past, and they see no reason to > >change. Gzip *is* better for single files, though - simply because it > >can *only* contain one file. > > Hell.. Why not use a tar + gzip combination? :) And why use it, when there is ZIP? ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 13:25:59 1999 Message-Id: <02be01beceb9$e3e415c0$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: <00fe01bec3d5$bd8e9100$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 14:02:19 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from QUOTED-PRINTABLE to 8bit by mail.comlab.ox.ac.uk id NAA29884 Status: RO Content-Length: 1578 Lines: 57 ----- Original Message ----- From: Nick Humphries To: Sent: 1. července 1999 17:23 Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a > > -----Original Message----- > From: Stuart Brady > To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no > Date: Thursday, July 01, 1999 3:45 PM > Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a > > > >Nick Humphries wrote: > > > >>PCs don't have gzip by default. > > > >PCs? You mean *WINDOWS*, don't you? > > Yes, which is a pretty important piece of information if you're developing for > Windows... > > > > And, as a Windows user, I'd like to say that when downloading software, most of > it has been in pkzip/winzip files (*.zip) rather than gzip files (*.gz). Not as > it is on Linux, I know, but another pretty important piece of information when > you're developing for Windows. > > Anyway, all this is moot since, as Allan pointed out, using the zlib library > eliminates the need for the user to somehow find a copy of gzip. So my solution > was a good one after all... Partially, since user usually wants to pack all his existing uncopressed files. This must be done using GZIP. Again, I preffer ZIP's possibility of packing multiple files. > > Nick ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 13:26:00 1999 Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 13:09:31 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Collier X-Sender: asc25@red.csi.cam.ac.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Enigma Variations II. In-Reply-To: <022901beceaa$3cdea920$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 2665 Lines: 71 On Thu, 15 Jul 1999, Aley Keprt wrote: > > and don't forget when we did defenders there was not one single game out ! > > Yes, Defenders is very old. Maybe the first one. "Defenders Of The Earth" was indeed the first commercial Sam game, no question about it... > The graphics doesn't look absolutely bad, but it is not brilliant. I think. > Alright. I don't want to beat you. (Are you the author?) He was, yes. > I just think Defenders is about nothing. > Maybe it is old, and it was hadr work to do, but this cannot > change the situation. > Do you think Manic Miner has brilliant graphics? I think no. > And if you say "it is very old" you are right, but compared with > Dan Dare III or Savage it simply looks badly. What has Manic Miner got to do with anything? Given the limitations of the Sam, I reckon DoE was pretty good. Sure, there have been better games on other computers, and better Sam games were written afterwards, but... Also I think you're a little harsh. Dan Dare III and Savage you mentioned are Spectrum games, and are limited by the spectum's video output; 15 fixed colours, block attribute resolution. They are impressive because they make the best possible use of the available resource. The Sam's graphical capabilities are much better; maybe DoE didn't push the Sam to its maximum, but the graphics still look nicer than anything the Spectrum could ever put out... > > playability none > > > > can't argue with that ! ;o) ..really there was no time, it was just a > matter > > of get it out the door as > > quick as possible, we had lousy bosses and that's how we had to work. The > > I must say again: No playability. Aley, he was agreeing with you.... > As I can see in british magazines (incl. Fred, Your Sinclair etc.) > british people don't look to the playability much. > e.g. Terminator II is one of the worst games ever made, > and it got a very high percentage score. This still goes on, to be honest. And not just in Britain either; the game industry seems dominated by Americans these days, and yet we're totally overwhelmed by cheap ripoffs of all the same game ideas... each with better graphics, smoother framerate, more polygons than the last version etc but I haven't seen anything *really* original for ages! As far as I can see, retrogaming is "in" because old games, done well, generally offer more playability than most of the current stuff. Just my opinion... Andrew -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 13:26:01 1999 Message-Id: <02e401becebb$47f35c50$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 14:12:17 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 2684 Lines: 62 > > > > >4. The only person who knows what he's doing on it is Simon himself. > > > > > > > > That's the problem. At least a todo list and some changelogs would be > > > > better than nothing. > > > > > > Personally I'd rather he spend time coding, than writing up useless > > > documantation. And (I'm playing devil's advocate here, slightly) what > > > makes you think it is any of your business how Simon chooses to spend his > > > time? > > > > What? Useless documentation??? > > Remember: DOCUMENTATION OS NEVER USELESS!!! > > This applies to the long-term projects as SimCoupe, when many people > > want to work on it. > > Please read some books on software engineering, there you can see > > some statistics from 60's-80's concerning on this fenomena. > > Probably you will surprised how necessary documentation is. > > %!$$ *&& Aley - look at the context. I'm not talking about documented > code, I'm talking about a "todo list and some changelogs" which _you_ were > asking for. What? Stuart Brady was asking, not me. I wrote that documentation is necessary. I don't mean comments in .c files, I mean standalone documentation (probably in Word - S.Brady will shoot me again for this ....) > Now, tell me; what good is it to you, right now, before the work is > actually released, if Si puts up a web page saying something like: > > "Fixed a glitch in palette changing. Windows now minimise properly. Added > .dsk.gz support in dialogs. To do: fix flag bug" etc etc > > I'm not saying it would be useless to him, but that it would be useless to > anyone else. Without the source there's nothing you can do with that sort > of text, and it's just wasting Si's time keeping it presentable. I imagine > he *is* keeping his own notes and docs, but it would be a waste of his > time, at the moment, to write those up in such a way that others could see > and understand them. Without sources? Are you silly??? I can't believe you wrote this... Nobody wanted documentation without program and sources. > Aley - don't patronise me. I know exactly why documentation is useful to > the developers of a project. But I wasn't talking about that sort of > documentation; and even if I was, until the source is released, you don't > need the docs because you're not involved with the development of Win32 > SimCoupe. Get over it. All right. Sorry for the misunderstanding. > Andrew ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 13:26:01 1999 Message-Id: <031701becebc$dde357f0$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 14:23:38 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 953 Lines: 28 > On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Nick Humphries wrote: > > > PCs don't have gzip by default. What's wrong with writing a custom compression > > routine which is portable between the various platforms? > > Why reinvent the wheel *again*? WinZip can handle gzip, and most windows > machines have winzip. If they don't, I can supply a Win95 version of gzip > (precompiled), and bzip2. Although you are right, I can say: WinZip supports ZIP. So we can use zip. Why do you think we should use gzip, when WinZip supports it. WinZip uses zip too. In addition WinZip is not free, anybody mentioned? Of course, we can find GNU GPL zip/unzip as well as gzip. > > Paul ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 13:26:01 1999 Message-ID: <0AEF0EB21F09D211AE4E0080C82733BF851B6D@mailhost.aculab.com> From: Justin Skists To: "'sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no'" Subject: RE: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 13:30:54 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2232.9) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2" X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from QUOTED-PRINTABLE to 8bit by mail.comlab.ox.ac.uk id NAA29896 Status: RO Content-Length: 1000 Lines: 31 I was being sarcastic... :) > -----Original Message----- > From: Aley Keprt [SMTP:AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com] > Sent: Thursday, July 15, 1999 12:59 PM > To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no > Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Justin Skists > To: > Sent: 1. července 1999 18:35 > Subject: RE: New: SimCoupe 0.783a > > > > >zip, too. They've always used zip in the past, and they see no reason > to > > >change. Gzip *is* better for single files, though - simply because it > > >can *only* contain one file. > > > > Hell.. Why not use a tar + gzip combination? :) > > And why use it, when there is ZIP? > > ---------------------------------------------------------------- > Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) > phone: +420-68-538 70 35 > e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley > ---------------------------------------------------------------- > From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 13:46:33 1999 Message-Id: <031e01becebd$996ad9d0$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: Subject: Re: New: SimCoupe 0.783a Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 14:28:52 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1095 Lines: 32 > Martin Fitzpatrick wrote: > > >I think the point is that the custom compression would be built into the > >main Sim-Coupe program, so whenever you open up a compressed DSK file, > >its automatically decompressed on the fly... So the user doesn't even > >know > > Zlib would be built in, too. Anyway, the only problem people have with > using seperate programs is that they sometimes have to be downloaded > seperately. If saaemu was distributed along with simcoupe, people would > be quite happy. > -- > Stuart Brady Dear Stuart, I explained this many times. Do you think Quake II, Diablo, Starcraft, and Windows 95 should be distributed together when people want to use them all? Probably not. And that's the case of SAAemu. It is a atandalone program, which is distributed separatedly. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 13:46:35 1999 Message-Id: <033301becebe$fb434330$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> From: "Aley Keprt" To: References: Subject: Re: Enigma Variations II. & Domark Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 14:38:46 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 2879 Lines: 67 > From: Andrew Collier > > > I just think Defenders is about nothing. > > Maybe it is old, and it was hadr work to do, but this cannot > > change the situation. > > Do you think Manic Miner has brilliant graphics? I think no. > > And if you say "it is very old" you are right, but compared with > > Dan Dare III or Savage it simply looks badly. > > What has Manic Miner got to do with anything? > > Given the limitations of the Sam, I reckon DoE was pretty good. Sure, > there have been better games on other computers, and better Sam games were > written afterwards, but... > > Also I think you're a little harsh. Dan Dare III and Savage you mentioned > are Spectrum games, and are limited by the spectum's video output; 15 > fixed colours, block attribute resolution. They are impressive because > they make the best possible use of the available resource. > > The Sam's graphical capabilities are much better; maybe DoE didn't push > the Sam to its maximum, but the graphics still look nicer than anything > the Spectrum could ever put out... Andrew, you haven't undertood my mail. I compared Sam's situation to the ZX Spectrum situation. I wrote that saying "Defenders has superb graphics." is the same as saying "Manic Miner has superb graphics." Then I mentioned some examples (Dan Dare III, etc.) of games with nice graphics on the Spectrum (compared to Manic Miner). So that's it. > > As I can see in british magazines (incl. Fred, Your Sinclair etc.) > > british people don't look to the playability much. > > e.g. Terminator II is one of the worst games ever made, > > and it got a very high percentage score. > > This still goes on, to be honest. And not just in Britain either; the game > industry seems dominated by Americans these days, and yet we're totally > overwhelmed by cheap ripoffs of all the same game ideas... each with > better graphics, smoother framerate, more polygons than the last version > etc but I haven't seen anything *really* original for ages! As far as I > can see, retrogaming is "in" because old games, done well, generally offer > more playability than most of the current stuff. > > Just my opinion... I think so. I must mention, that I everytime preffered Spectrum games with bad graphics over Enigma's games for Sam. I don't know much about other Sam users, but I like Pipe Mania or Klax more than Prince Of Persia, Sphera or Defenders (the worst is Sam Out). Oh yea, Prince and Klax are from Domark. What is Domark? Or Tengen? Is it another Enigma-like company which did a few great games in 1990? > Andrew ---------------------------------------------------------------- Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.) phone: +420-68-538 70 35 e-mail: AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com *** http://get.to/aley ---------------------------------------------------------------- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 14:17:39 1999 Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 13:46:38 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Collier X-Sender: asc25@red.csi.cam.ac.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP In-Reply-To: <02e401becebb$47f35c50$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1535 Lines: 37 On Thu, 15 Jul 1999, Aley Keprt wrote: > > %!$$ *&& Aley - look at the context. I'm not talking about documented > > code, I'm talking about a "todo list and some changelogs" which _you_ were > > asking for. > > What? Stuart Brady was asking, not me. Sorry, you're right, it was Stuart who asked for the "todo list and some changelogs". But I was replying to that particular paragraph when you challenged me about my use of the phrase "useless documentation". > > I'm not saying it would be useless to him, but that it would be useless to > > anyone else. Without the source there's nothing you can do with that sort > > of text, and it's just wasting Si's time keeping it presentable. I imagine > > he *is* keeping his own notes and docs, but it would be a waste of his > > time, at the moment, to write those up in such a way that others could see > > and understand them. > > Without sources? Are you silly??? I can't believe you wrote this... But you *don't* have the Win32 sources. This is what you're all complaining about. > Nobody wanted documentation without program and sources. I understood Stuart's email to mean that he wanted access to the todo list and changelog, even if Si hadn't released the source yet. Quite what he thought he'd do with it is another question entirely. Anrew -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 14:35:43 1999 X-sendmail-revision: 29-Mar-1999 (23) by ant@tissoft.co.uk Message-ID: <003501becec3$9d092780$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> From: "Nick Humphries" To: Subject: Re: Enigma Variations II. & Domark Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 14:11:56 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 798 Lines: 22 From: Aley Keprt >Oh yea, Prince and Klax are from Domark. What is Domark? Or Tengen? >Is it another Enigma-like company which did a few great games in 1990? Domark have been in the Speccy business since about 1984/5, probably most famous for geting the James Bond licence and it's deal with coin-op manufacturers Atari (later renamed their coin-op division to Tengen). Domark had a dodgy start, then had a good spell with their Tengen conversions for a couple of years, then lost their way when they found that Tengen coin-op games were becoming poorer and poorer. Domark eventually got bought by Eidos. An interview with Dominic Wheatley and Mark Strachan can be found at the YS Rock'n'Roll Years at: http://www.the-den.clara.net/ys/articles/back1088.htm Nick From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 14:44:04 1999 Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 14:25:38 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Collier X-Sender: asc25@red.csi.cam.ac.uk To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Enigma Variations II. & Domark In-Reply-To: <033301becebe$fb434330$7251c29e@inf.upol.cz> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 1731 Lines: 39 On Thu, 15 Jul 1999, Aley Keprt wrote: > > > Do you think Manic Miner has brilliant graphics? I think no. > > > And if you say "it is very old" you are right, but compared with > > > Dan Dare III or Savage it simply looks badly. > > > > What has Manic Miner got to do with anything? > > Andrew, you haven't undertood my mail. > I compared Sam's situation to the ZX Spectrum situation. > I wrote that saying "Defenders has superb graphics." is the same as > saying "Manic Miner has superb graphics." Well not really.... since Manic Miner's graphics aren't especially good (on the Spectrum version, at least) wheras DoE's graphics are actually quite nice. Which Sam games in particular would you say have better graphics? > Oh yea, Prince and Klax are from Domark. What is Domark? Or Tengen? > Is it another Enigma-like company which did a few great games in 1990? Tengen is the arcade games company which originally produced KLAX. Domark are the software house who published KLAX for Spectrum, Amstrad, C64, Amiga, ST etc. I think the Sam releases of KLAX and EFtPotRM was actually handled by Enigma (hence the music is by Sean Conran, like nearly all the other Enigma games) under license to Domark. The Sam release of PoP was handled by Revelation, under license to Domark. Generally, the big companies (like Domark) paid very little attention to the Sam, and it was only when little companies (or individuals) programmed their Sam games for them that anything actually got released. Andrew -- -- Andrew Collier (asc25@cam.ac.uk) -- My other -- http://mnemotech.ucam.org -- .sig is a -- Part 3 Materials Science, Cambridge -- PDF file -- From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 15:02:49 1999 X-sendmail-revision: 29-Mar-1999 (23) by ant@tissoft.co.uk Message-ID: <003e01becec7$6e2e62a0$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> From: "Nick Humphries" To: Subject: Re: Enigma Variations II. & Domark Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 14:39:15 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5 X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 626 Lines: 15 From: Andrew Collier >Generally, the big companies (like Domark) paid very little attention to >the Sam, and it was only when little companies (or individuals) programmed >their Sam games for them that anything actually got released. Indeed, and usually only following the "Chris White Method", which is to write the conversion secretly, then get a licence to sell it. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, in which case the gameplay was tweaked here and there, graphics changed a little, and the end result is sold as a game in its own right (he says, half-remembering an article in YS93...). Nick From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 19:09:53 1999 From: "Maria Rookyard" To: "SAM Users Mailing List" Subject: Re: SimCoupe 0.783a - ZIP Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 16:11:36 +0100 Message-ID: <01beced4$54e169c0$LocalHost@register> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.71.1712.3 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.71.1712.3 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 191 Lines: 11 > "Go and get DOS because it's the right STANDARD!!!!" -- if we listened > to that sort of advice, we'd all be living in trees. You mean like standard rose trees or something? Maria. From owner-sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Thu Jul 15 19:28:09 1999 Message-ID: <00a501beceef$6d469380$410bf0d4@chris> From: "Chris White" To: References: <003e01becec7$6e2e62a0$4f4020c0@tistemp3.tissoft.co.uk> Subject: Re: Enigma Variations II. & Domark Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 19:25:32 +0100 X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2314.1300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 X-Orcpt: rfc822;sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Reply-To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Status: RO Content-Length: 684 Lines: 20 > Indeed, and usually only following the "Chris White Method", which is to >write > the conversion secretly, then get a licence to sell it. Sometimes it worked, > sometimes it didn't, in which case the gameplay was tweaked here and there, > graphics changed a little, and the end result is sold as a game in its own right > (he says, half-remembering an article in YS93...). Can't really take all the credit for this method , as Wayne Hay (PipeMania) and I started doing a Pipemainia type game (Frustrate) for Amstard Cpc & Speccy , then Daniel Gardner (Was going to be Publisher) got Wayne to do PipeMainia officially for Sam. These YS Articule's , are they online anywhere ??