wirch@puff.UUCP (10/28/85)
My Amiga developer friend John Foust speaks again... --------------- From: John Foust Re: The Amiga Tech BBS in San Jose I downloaded all the good stuff, and I've burst the shar-like files into pieces. If you've signed up for AMICUS, I'll copy this if you send me a disk and SASE mailer. This disk has source to SetSerial, Image.Ed, R.J. Mical's Intuition test suite, demos of BOBs and playfields, device code examples and more... If you want it on IBM disks, I have that way, too. Re: IBM to Amiga serial links, solution to "Read timed out." I've been transfering text all day. Sure wish I had Kermit or something. Actually, I started translating C Kermit to the Amiga. I was desparate. Developer Eric lavitsky@rutgers said he was porting Kermit a long time ago, with terminal emulation and maybe xmodem, too, but he hasn't posted much since. I can't wait to have modem transfers happening in the background. I wrote a little filter to transfer IBM text files to the Amiga via READ. It expands TABs to spaces, and ignores CR, and lets LF through. Rick will post it to net.sources. (Note: CONVERT converts a binary image to a READ hex stream, with no character translation. CONVERT is no good for text.) A Compaq+ couldn't keep up with the Amiga's READ program - the cause of "Read timed out" message comes from. If the hex file is already on disk, at 9600 baud, it works, but when COM1: is driven by a filter, you get "time out" messages. At 9600, I got lots of "invalid character(s)" messages, but at 4800 baud, no bad characters, and the filter can keep up 98% of the time. On longer files, it still timed out. I thought this had to do with disk access time, but it did the same while in ram: disk, too. Sending the filter output to an intermediate file solved the problem. Also, be comforted: the Amiga has some form of protection on the serial port. I plugged a ribbon cable from the Amiga to the Compaq's port, WITHOUT my adapter that prevented +5, etc. from hitting the Compaq. By accident, of course. The Amiga re-booted, the keyboard was dead, with the CAPS LOCK light stuck on, but I disconnected and reseated the keyboard cable, and all was well. Whew. If you need to transfer IBM PC files to the Amiga, I offer to do the transfer for free, so more P.D. programs are ported to the Amiga. I've started to port a few. Who has an archive of useful C programs?. If we don't like what's in c:, we can write new commands - like Unix-style ls instead of dir and list. Re: SetSerial, Icon.Ed, Font.Editor, Image.Ed On a tip from the net, I went to my local dealer, and searched all their demo disks for these programs. I found SetSerial, Icon.Ed and Image.Ed. The IconEd program ran, but wouldn't load or save. It was from pre-V1.0 AmigaDOS, so I don't trust it. ImageEd loads and saves, and looks like IconEd, but what can you do with it? It edits 9 small images at once in 640 mode, and lets you animate them. If Workbench icons are BOBs, can they be animated? This would be a cute hack: little dancing icons. A Boing! icon that bounces all the time. Or a pointer sprite that animates as you move it. A co-resident task could do these, I think. Remember, you saw it here first. The old SetSerial I found didn't work right. With the SetSerial source, I updated it to V1.0. Note that you can't set the baud rate with this tool. You have to update baud rate with Preferences instead. Re: AMICUS: AMIga Computer USers How can we reach others? It might be nice to court non-developer Amiga users. I'm going to post something to the Source and CompuServe. It seems the Amiga user groups and BBSs at present are just out to make $$$. Maybe they could be separate SIGs. Any comment? If anyone has any public domain Amiga programs they want to put on a AMICUS public library disk, please send those, too. I'm very receptive to suggestions about this AMICUS group. What sort of direction do you think it should go? Once things get settled, I'll use your SASE envelopes to send out a newsletter. It would be nice to get together electronic versions of a CLI manual. Non-developer hackers are really stalled. This would be a good first project for AMICUS. Any takers? To sign up, send two SASE envelopes, and proof of developer status if you want a copy of the Tech BBS disk. Please send any software you'd like to add to the public or developer library. Sight & Sound Music Software, Attn: John Foust, 16 N. Carroll St. Suite 600, Madison, WI 53703, (608) 256-3646