gpvos@cs.vu.nl (Gerben 'P' Vos) (02/06/91)
Hi net.acorn-users,
Two problems have been reported with the Xarc and UUDecode programs i posted,
and i have discovered that i have omitted English documentation for ArcRom,
which will certainly cause trouble in some circumstances.
But first something different : the files have now been sent to the Newcastle
info-server, info-server@newcastle.ac.uk, and to tolsun.oulu.fi . If your site
doesn't carry eunet.micro.acorn, you can get the files from there.
Now for the problems :
The first is in the "Xarc" ROM image. This doesn't work on a Master, giving a
"This is not a language ROM" error. The solution is to change the byte at &8006
from &82 to &C2 :
*load Xarc 2000
?&2006=&C2
*save Xarc 2000+1080
The second is in the UUDecode programs. These are quite inflexible at the
moment with regard to the format of line breaks; they expect only linefeed
characters. I was already aware of this, but hadn't realised that they would
produce utter rubbish when decoding a file. Two other articles contain more
flexible programs, one in Basic and one in assembler. Those two articles will
only appear in eunet.micro.acorn .
Both of these fixes have not been reported to remove the problems reported,
but they should be an improvement at least.
Thirdly, i have forgotten to translate the documentation of the Arc ROM to
English. The operation of this program is quite straightforward anyway, but
there is a major pitfall; read below. Discard the old version of the file
"ArcDoc" unless you're willing to study Dutch, and replace it with the
following, which is my translation of Bart Bruns's original text :
---cut here---
Manual for Arc ROM.
The ROM must be loaded into a sideways RAM bank. The Write Protect
of the bank must be OFF when using the ROM, because the ROM uses the
area of RAM after the code for a table. If the Write Protect is off
the ROM will work normally, but the produced arcfile will contain
nonsense when compression method 8 is used.
Start with :
*ARC
Firstly you will be asked for the name of the Arc file which must be
produced. Then the program will repeatedly ask for the name of a
file which you want to include in the arcfile. Then you will be
asked which "compression method" you want to use.
You can enter :
2 : Include the file without compressing.
8 : Dynamic Lempel-Zev compression. This method will usually
result in a considerable compression. There are files,
however, which will not be compressed and even expand
when this method is applied.
Together with each file in the arcfile, date and time will be
included. If Osword 14 is available, it will be used to get the date
and time, otherwise a fixed date and time are used ( September 25,
1988, 17:32 ).
When all files have been included in the arcfile, enter RETURN or
ESCAPE at the prompt for a file name. The arcfile will be closed and
the last active ROM will be started.
Note by Gerben Vos : ArcROM contains a bug, which causes some bytes
to be lost when compressing some large files using method 8. You can
check for this by decompressing the file. A workaround is to add a
number of extra bytes (typically between 10 and 20) at the end of
the file you're about to compress.
---cut here, too---
- Gerben
--
--- Gerben Vos - Aconet: BIGBEN!Gerben Vos - Internet: gpvos@cs.vu.nl
---- The fact that the "new world order" Bush is speaking about has to be
----- established by means of a war, makes me wonder what this new world order
------ is all about.gpvos@cs.vu.nl (Gerben 'P' Vos) (02/06/91)
I wrote: >Both of these fixes have not been reported to remove the problems reported, ^^^ should be: not YET >but they should be an improvement at least. - Gerben -- --- Gerben Vos - Aconet: BIGBEN!Gerben Vos - Internet: gpvos@cs.vu.nl ---- The fact that the "new world order" Bush is speaking about has to be ----- established by means of a war, makes me wonder what this new world order ------ is all about.