toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel) (10/18/89)
Well, I took the info Dave gave me and sat down for an hour or so Monday night with the Toolbox manuals, and wrote a quick little bit that takes a SHR pic loaded in by Basic.System and adds it to the Message Center as a background picture. After running it (I still can't believe it didn't even hit an error on the first run) I BYE'd back to finder and LO AND BEHOLD my desktop was a picture! This afternoon (tues) I wrote a nice error-trapped Applesoft short to load an unpacked (type $C1) SHR pic called "DeskPicture" (not case sensitive, it just does a BLOAD) and run the machine code, which is only 203 bytes WITH debug code. (can you say BRK bomb on any error?) Since this is not a real solution (i.e. NDA) I am not releasing this officially but if anyone would like the code, I have shk-d and binscii-d it, and I even though it is 10K (including my test pic, which I got off our Mac Lab's PD ROM) I would rather not waste net bandwidth here by posting it. So unless everybody wants a copy I'd rather mail it personally, so I can give all of you the NDA when I get the time to finish learning APW and NDA creation. The code I have written so far is either public domain (the applesoft loader) or belongs in a tech note (the toolbox part), so I haven't bothered to put a copyright message on either program. Besides, if it took a total of two hours to write, what's the point? When the NDA is finished (unless someone beats me to it :), I will release it as FreeWare because something this useful should not have a price on it. Not to offend anyone, but I personally can't stand ShareWare because some of the ShareWare stuff I have is not worth even the $10. If the NDA looks to me like it is worth $5 because it took a lot of time, and is really nice, I might consider it. But I sincerely doubt it, because I probably couldn't bring myself to do it, since I'm one of those rare guys who actually programs in assembler because he enjoys it. *** OUT OF SOAP ERR I think the quirk report deserves its own post. Todd P Whitesel toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu