c60c-3aw@tarantula.berkeley.edu (Andy McFadden) (10/16/88)
Yet more miscellaneous stuff, starting off with comments about the fractal
mountain generator I posted to comp.binaries.apple2 the other night:
1. I let it run all night with a smoothness of 2, a complexity of 8, and a seed
of 50. It looked pretty nice, but it died sometime after a few hours (got
probably 2/3 done). I have 768K of RAM, but 128K was used by the RAM disk
and ProDOS 16 probably grabbed a bunch more... it could have been a problem
with a stack overflow or just poor garbage collection.
2. I managed to resolve the problem with not being able to save the screen
easily:
a. Hit open apple - control - reset, and boot into ProDOS 8. The memory for
the SHR screen is from E0/2000 - E0/9FFF, and won't be disturbed by most
programs.
b. Get into the monitor, type "C029:C1" to see your picture. If everything
is okay so far, hit ctrl-T to return to text mode. Create the file with
"CREATE <filename>, T$C1" (uncompressed SHR pic)
c. Move the picture into bank 0, one half of it at a time. Type
"00/2000<E0/2000.6000M" to move the lower half down, and save it with
"BSAVE <filename>, A$2000, L$4000". Note that you might have to return
to BASIC with ctrl-C for this to work; I'm not sure about whether or not
the bank registers will screw up ProDOS's operations.
d. Move the rest of the picture with "00/2000<E0/6000.A000M". Now append it
on to the first file with "BSAVE <filename>, A$2000, L$4000, B$4000".
Now crank up SHRConvert or a paint program to see if it worked properly. A
paint program would probably be more useful; it would be nice to remove the
"press any key to continue" from the top of the screen.
3. Now, a note to dkletter (couldn't get mail through, but this is really
of general interest anyway):
The reasons for using DDDeluxe are:
a. (I sure like outline formats) It compresses things smaller than standard
DDD does,
b. It runs faster than most other programs, and
c. It allows you to put a brief bit of text at the beginning.
Reasons a and b came from some benchmarks that somebody performed; oddly,
DigiPack GS was not represented in these benchmarks. I am also aware
that DP Optimized format allows you to put a message there, but Optimized
only works on ProDOS disks as far as I know.
The real strength of DigiPack is its use of GS memory; not having to swap
more than once is *very* important on a one-drive system.
4. Another comment about my CPS 3.5 drive (GOD I HATE THIS THING!):
When unpacking things sometimes, the disk will develop an I/O error on one
of the blocks. This is NOT an unpacking error, it is a mangling of the
disk format. I tried unpacking a program once with DigiPack and DDDeluxe,
and both consistently left errors on certain blocks (each program
killed the same blocks each time, but each did DIFFERENT blocks... weird).
I had to unpack twice and combine the working parts... a real pain on an
800K disk.
The only thing I can think of is the continual on-off activity of the
drive while unpacking; I have had strange things happen while saving
pictures with SHRConvert (physical I/O error, corrupted files). When
I saved them to the RAM disk and copied them with Copy II Plus, the
images were undamaged!
I've said it before and I'll say it again: STAY AWAY FROM CLONE DRIVES
UNLESS YOU ALREADY HAVE A FULLY FUNCTIONING STANDARD APPLEDISK 3.5!
<setenv RANTNRAVE off>
--
fadden@zen.berkeley.edu [crashed]
c60c-3aw@widow.berkeley.edu (Andy McFadden)
"This is the comment that has been previously omitted."