wirch@puff.UUCP (10/21/85)
My developer friend has left me another file to post to Usenet. I've been downloading the interesting parts of this discussion for him, and he leaves me files to post now and then. Here's another. ------------ From: John Foust Re: XON/XOFF I've found that holding the right mouse button down during screen output will freeze things, even during Wack output, which didn't respond to Ctrl S. Re: Wack Does an early Amiga developer (or Amiga themselves) want to post a summary of Wack commands? Most of it is obvious, but I still haven't figured out how to set registers to a certain value, in particular, the PC... or read and write out blocks of memory to disk, or a lot of things I'd like to do. Re: New bug I was re-arranging my Workbench disk, to set up a ram disk, and rename c: programs to what my fingers are used to typing under MeSsy-DOS... I renamed 'delete' to 'del', but 'delo' showed up on the screen. I was sure I hadn't hit the 'o', so I re-typed 'del', and got 'delo'. I found that fast, 2-key-rollover, will do funny things. Hold 'w' and 's' down, press 'h', and get 'wshy' on the screen. Look at these keys on your keyboard, and you'll see the pattern - you get the key above the third key in the sequence, just as a bonus while the others are pressed. However, this doesn't happen with 'mkd' (as in mkdir). Typing 'mkd' gets 'mkd', so it looks like the scanning of the keyboard is screwy. I managed to get most of the useful tools into a 60K ram disk, which certainly saved disk wear and tear. Re: IconEd, SetSerial programs Will the guy who said he had SetSerial please post a uuencoded version of the binary? What other tools were sitting on that demo disk? Also, it would be nice to get IconEd. I don't care if it eats memory, or refuses to de-allocate it when it's done. I'll re-boot. Big deal, for now. There is no reason developers shouldn't have gotten these right away. Hell, they gave out the Wack disk without documentation... Re: Amiga reps, Cambridge Lisp and Amiga Pascal I got a copy of these from my local travelling Amiga rep, sans documentation. I didn't ask for them, he gave them to me. He said it was all right, since I was a developer. Aren't these guys being a bit sloppy? From what he was saying, it sounds like some dealers were giving away beta (maybe alpha) copies of TextCraft and Graphicraft with Amiga purchases, under the table, since there isn't anything else out yet. The rep said I knew more than he did about the machine, which didn't surprise me, and the guy had to take a lunch break, and so he left the machine to me and a crowd of thirty begging for demos, so I gave a little talk. One guy complained that he thought the resolution was too low, as compared to the IBM monochrome. I tried to tell him they were the same... Also, this kind of behaviour wasn't unique among Amiga travelling reps, since the other rep I've met was as free with distribution of beta software as this guy. His card said "manager of reconditioned hardware" or some such title. Anyways, I dumped the lisp binary, and deciphered most of the functions available, and wrote a few functions like the towers of hanoi and fibonachi. They seemed to run fast, with a few garbage collects that spewed a line of diagnostics each. It didn't have 'defun', as I was used to, so I had to use 'lambda' instead. Unknown functions generated a seek to disk, to retrieve an error message. Does anybody have a real manual for these? In particular, I couldn't find the load and save functions. Open and close work, but I couldn't find the re-direction functions, so no load or save. Maybe the rep was handing out crippled beta versions, after all. The lisp binary had the word 'tripos' in one spot, and 'amigados' a few bytes away. Looks like these packages were direct ports from previous Tripos packages. Has anyone really heard of Tripos before? Does this mean that there might be a repository of Tripos software tools and utilities on a dusty tape in a basement at Cambridge U? Amiga, if you are listening, there are hundreds of developers and hackers who will port old Tripos stuff for free, if you hand it out... Does anybody at Cambridge care to comment? Does anyone know a more detailed history of its evolution? The Amiga Pascal (also from Metacomco) compiles fast, so fast that I thought it wasn't working. It has some nice options, like switches so that the compiler only does syntax checking without a compilation. Dumping the binary showed a standard Pascal, with user heap management if you wanted. Didn't see any other non-standardisms. However, 'hello.pas' executable weighed out at over 24K, but I might have linked wrong, but it ran. I also had the feeling that it linked faster than I expected, which led to the corresponding though that Metacomco languages might link faster than the Lattice C - since Lattice might not know as much about the linker, that they generate too many hunks or something - just a thought. The Metacomco linker is pretty slow on Lattice C object files. Re: picture formats Does anybody know what tools drew the demo pictures we have all seen? I have seen at least three formats for lo-res pictures - '.pic', (from the ballet pictures) '.plbm' (on the EA demo disk) and '' (no extension) from Graphicraft. I almost finished a translator from '.pic' to Graphicraft last night, so I could view the ballet pictures. I heard that the ballet pictures form an animation sequence that is on the TV commercial - is this true? Re: Amiga Tech support BBS I sent in my registration about two weeks ago, but still no verification or login name or password. I heard the BBS was moving from Los Gatos CA to West Chester PA. I'm still waiting. Re: Amiga source code Who will post the second Amiga source to the net? Eric Lavitsky posted 'hello.c' over a month ago. I know the guys at Amiga who recently joined the net must have a lot of source code sitting around. PLEASE! Could you post some, or mail some to this address? An arpa-able address archive - that would be great. And all you'd have to do is send out a tape. I'd love to see more examples of Amiga C code, and I am sure you could distribute the source to a few demos that are essentially public domain at this point. John Foust, 16 N. Carroll St Suite 600, Madison, Wi. 53703 (608) 256-3646 ----------- Rick
eric@caip.RUTGERS.EDU (Eric Lavitsky) (10/23/85)
Hi,
The picture format used by both Graphicraft and Electronic Arts is
called 'IFF' format. It is an encoding scheme developed by ECA for
compacting pictures. The scheme allows you to store about 30 320x200
32 color screens on one disk (I believe). The format has been adopted
by Commodore as a standard, and all developers will be receiving the
full spec for the scheme with the 1.1 release (which should be coming
up soon).
As far as the .pic files you have from V27 - unfortunately, there seems
to have been a slight change in the .pic file format from V27 to 1.0
Graphicraft under V27 reads the old files fine, but i don't believe the
beta Graphicraft for 1.0 will read V27 files. The ballet pictures you
have are just a slide show of still pictures (some quite nice). The actual
animated sequence was done using an animation editor (perhaps an early
MovieCraft?). Most all of the still lo res pictures you have seen were
done with Graphicraft. Electronic Arts is doing their own stuff with
Deluxe Paint - which can read Graphicraft files, and which can also
edit in 640x200 and 640x400 resolution.
I too would like to see more source code. I haven't had much time to
program on my Amiga lately, but I am stumped on a number of things
especially due to the lack of consistency in the ROM Kernal manual
(mostly missing fragments...)
Eric
--
ARPA: LAVITSKY@RUTGERS
UUCP: ...{harvard,seismo,ut-sally,sri-iu,ihnp4}!topaz!eric
SNAIL: 16 Oak St., Flr 2
New Brunswick, NJ 08903nazgul@apollo.uucp (Kee Hinckley) (10/23/85)
In article <489@puff.UUCP> wirch@puff.UUCP writes: > >Re: Amiga reps, Cambridge Lisp and Amiga Pascal > >Anyways, I dumped the lisp binary, and deciphered most of the >functions available, and wrote a few functions like the towers of >hanoi and fibonachi. They seemed to run fast, with a few garbage >collects that spewed a line of diagnostics each. It didn't have >'defun', as I was used to, so I had to use 'lambda' instead. Unknown >functions generated a seek to disk, to retrieve an error message. > I don't know if the lisp I played with was Cambridge Lisp, but the one I played with at a dealers understood 'de' rather than 'defun'. Let's hear it for lisp standards. -kee ...decvax!wanginst!apollo!nazgul -- The Hydrogen Dog and the Cobalt Cat, side by side in the armory sat. Nobody thought of fusion or fission, everyone spoke of their peacetime mission. Till somebody came and opened the door and they they were in in a neutron fog; the Codrogen Cat and the Hybalt Dog. They mushroomed up with a terrible roar, and nobody, never, was there no more. "The Space Childs Mother Goose"