[comp.sys.apple] ATP-Pro 1.17 update, and future

elliott@yosemite.steinmetz (08/26/88)

Well, my internship at GE is ending tomorrow, and I'm headed off into
the unknown on an exchange semester with Williams College. So it may
be a while before I get plugged back in to the UseNet.

ATP will continue to grow during this time. File transfer's coming,
and some really neat stuff I'm not at liberty to talk about yet. Those
of you who are interested, stay tuned.

Here's a brief summary of some things which have been added since my
last network posting of the program:

 * Segments are searched for more cleverly; unless you give an
   absolute pathname ATP first checks /RAM/SEGMENTS, then your current
   prefix, and finally its own segments directory.

 * The HELP segment checks if it can find the help file it wants in
   /RAM/HELP before loading it from disk. This makes it possible to
   get significantly faster help, which addresses an issue raised by
   some users who have floppies and found the access time a little
   slow.

 * There was a bug in the state in which ATP left some of the screen
   soft switches, which led to temporary (ugly) screen glitches while
   /RAM was being accessed; this has been fixed.

 * ATP will now approximate the VT100 graphics line-drawing characters
   using ASCII, like Kermit does.

 * I have added a VTSET segment which allows the user to set whether
   the arrow keys should default to sending their Apple ASCII values
   or the VT100 cursor key sequences. It will also allow you to choose
   which of the VT100 character attributes (bold, underscore, blinking
   and reverse) show up as reverse-video. This information can be
   stored in the config file.

 * Another new segment is WAITCALL. This separates most of the code
   used to await incoming phone calls from ATP, so I can fit more in
   ATP itself (space there is at a high premium). If you invoke this
   segment interactively it lets you choose the four baud rates at
   which ATP will accept incoming calls, and the speed of its
   inactivity timeout.

 * Finally, VIEW is a segment that lets you examine ProDOS files in
   several different display formats, including disassembly. You can
   search through them for strings, and make changes to the files
   contents and lengths if you disable the safeties which by default
   prevent such changes. VIEW works remotely, naturally...

Anyway, people who would like to contact me may still do so through
U.S. Mail to the address given in the ATP documentation, or at RPI at
the following addresses:
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 Jim Elliott                       / 
                                  /                  userE2U7@rpitsmts.BITNET
 "Let's try that again, slowly." /                 userE2U7%mts@itsgw.rpi.edu
                                / 
 .     .    .    .   .  . ... .  .   .    .    .     .    .   .   .  . ... . .