 
INFO-ATARI16 Digest         Mon, 22 Jan 90       Volume 90 : Issue   78
 
Today's Topics:
                                Elite!
                   GNU-Emacs 18.55, binary patch #1
                   ST Technical Questions (2 msgs)
                      TOS executable file format
               VIP Professional, Streaks on the screen
                              Wordup 2.0
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Date: 22 Jan 90 04:46:13 GMT
From: dartvax!eleazar.dartmouth.edu!dav@CS.BU.EDU  (William David Haas)
Subject: Elite!
Message-ID: <18716@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
 
In article <7541@shlump.nac.dec.com> gleason@clt.dec.com (Daryl Gleason) writes:
>    I haven't actually tried it.  However, the following is from my Elite
>manual, page 35, under "Escape Capsule" (grammatical errors are theirs, too):
>
explaination deleted
 
 
I have tried it.  I have tried escaping in the same system.  I have tried
hyper jumping to a new system (that I have never been too) and escaping.
I have done this with offender status and with fugitive status.
 
Nothing has worked.  I can't get my status to clean.  I have now logged in
15 hours with my current game and haven't been approached for the missions.
I assume this is because of my legal status.
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 18 Jan 90 18:09:04 GMT
From: mcsun!unido!sbsvax!roeder@uunet.uu.net  (Edgar Roeder)
Subject: GNU-Emacs 18.55, binary patch #1
Message-ID: <2231@sbsvax.UUCP>
 
/*
[Please don't ask me where emacs is, it's posted and will come soon!]
 
This is the first (binary) patch to my last release of GNU-Emacs for the st.
Yesterday i discovered this nasty little bug in the timer routines for emacs
and i found a rather short solution to patch it.
Although you might not have received the posting yet, please keep the
appended little C-program. Then after you got the posted version of temacs
compile it and run without parameters to patch temacs.
The corrected bug may never hit you (it's hard to reproduce and *very* time
critical), but if it does, hours of work may be lost.
 
        - Edgar
*/
 
#include <osbind.h>
 
main()
?
        int     fd;
        short   patch_area[16];
 
        if((fd = Fopen("temacs",2)) < 0) Pterm(1);
        Fseek(232092L, fd, 0);
        Fread(fd, 28, patch_area+1);
        patch_area[0] = 0x40E7;
        patch_area[15] = 0x4E77;
        Fseek(-28L, fd, 1);
        Fwrite(fd, 32, patch_area);
        Fclose(fd);
?
--
 
Mail:  Edgar R\"oder                    E-Mail: roeder@cs.uni-sb.de
       Liesbet-Dill-Stra\ss e 3
D-6602 Dudweiler                               -o-   -o-
       W-Germany                                   ~
Phone: 06897/74643                               '---'
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 22 Jan 90 03:03:36 GMT
From: cs.utexas.edu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!barry@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
 (Barry Lay)
Subject: ST Technical Questions
Message-ID: <1990Jan22.030336.7741@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>
 
Hello,
  I have several questions about programming on the ST that I can not answer
with my current documentation.  I am asking all of these at once in the hope
that it will reduce network load.  For the same reason, please respond to me
rather than the net, and I will summarize and post if there is some interest.
If you must use followup, please don't include the whole note to answer one
question and help those guys (like me) who are using modems.
 
For reference, here are some possibly relevant background facts.  I am using
an Atari Mega ST4 with an attached SH204 hard drive and a SF314 external
disk (in addition to the internal one).  It has a standard SC1224 colour
monitor.  The GEMDOS Sversion() call returns 0x1300, and I am using Lattice
C for development.  The MENU+ appears to be at the 1.1 level, and the compiler
reports version 3.03.  The desktop info box doesn't have a version listed, but
it does have a copyright notice for 1986 and 1987.
 
1. I have a program which builds object trees dynamically.  It seems to have
   problems when the tree gets more than ten (10) levels deep.  That is, the
   number of objects within objects within ... gets to ten.  The objc_draw()
   call bombs if I ask it to draw the whole thing, and objc_find() stops at
   the tenth level, even though there are offspring objects which are
   selectable.  Is this a design limitation?  The mentioned routines would
   have to specially check for this limit, as anything modelled after Tim
   Oren's map_tree() wouldn't do this.
 
2. While playing around with Mr. Oren's "New Form Manager", I noticed that
   as the program gets more complex, it becomes easier to crash it by moving
   the mouse around quickly.  I presume that the rectangle waits are falling
   behind the action and some internal event queue is getting overloaded.
   Is there any way to overcome this?  I shudder to think of the effort
   involved in handling all of the Ikbd interrupts myself.  Has anyone done
   this sort of thing?
 
3. When I select a command from the MENU+ window, I frequently get a blank
   text screen with nothing happening.  I discovered that the application
   appears to be waiting for an interrupt or something, because if I move
   the mouse even a little bit, the program takes off.  I would write this
   off as a MENU+ bug, except that I have occasionally seen this happen
   with the desktop when selecting a program to run.  Has anyone else seen
   this one?
 
4. Speaking of the desktop, I have noticed that the mouse position for closing
   a window is very picky.  I suppose that you wouldn't want the window to
   close accidently, but this is silly.  I have even managed to get the close
   box to invert (selected), but not have the window close.  Could this be a
   hardware problem?
 
5. There was mention of a "Pexec cookbook" a while back.  Could someone please
   send me the reference to that?
 
6. I see a number of neighbours submitting to the net.  Where do you folks go
   for Atari service and documentation in Toronto?  Is TOS 1.4 available here?
   I am also having fun finding most of the popular "hacker's" books.  It is
   largely hit and miss, mostly miss.  I have found some of the Abacus books
   and the third COMPUTE Technical Reference (TOS).  I would love to get the
   first two.
 
7. My hard disk quite often develops an annoying buzzing sound, like mosquitos
   are trapped inside.  Tapping the box makes it go away (for a short while),
   but I don't like moving a running hard disk.  Is there some component which
   needs to be glued down inside?
 
8. I borrowed a 1040 STf a few weeks ago.  I noticed that it was noticeably
   slower than the Mega, especially for following mouse events.  It was
   particularly bad for a game I wrote which does a lot of blitting, even
   when the blitter was turned off with the desktop menu on the Mega.
   It is the same processor, isn't it?
 
9. Is there an editor which emulates either MacWrite or EDT out there?  I am
   not much of an Emacs fan.
 
I am working on a graphically oriented multitasking system, mostly for my own
edification.  I would be interested in conversing with others who have either
done this sort of thing or who have ideas.
 
On the note of marketing, a Toronto radio station is giving Portfolios away as
a prize for one of their contests.
 
Thanks in advance,
 
Barry Lay
Statistical and Numerical Analysis Computing Supervisor
University of Toronto Computing Services
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 22 Jan 90 07:17:53 GMT
From: cs.utexas.edu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!barry@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
 (Barry Lay)
Subject: ST Technical Questions
Message-ID: <1990Jan22.071753.17009@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>
 
Hello,
  I forgot a few questions when I posted the first note.
 
10. I have an application which tracks the mouse cursor in and out of a
    window by doing a rectangle wait for the window work area in addition
    to the standard message wait.  I trap the various messages which move
    or change the window to keep the rectangle in the right place.  With
    more than one window on the screen, I trap the WM_TOP message to set
    the new rectangle.  However, closing a window doesn't seem to send a
    WM_TOP message for the newly active window.  I can disable the rectangle
    wait on window close, but I would really like to find the new window
    and do it right.  Does anybody have an answer for this?
 
11. I got my ST second hand, and I am probably missing some documentation.
    What does the "install application" function do, and how do I use it?
    I had the impression that I could change the application that would
    automatically launch if I double-clicked on a non-program file, but
    I can't get it to do anything.
 
12. What sort of fonts can I load with the vst_load_fonts() call?  Is this
    a GDOS question (whatever that is)?
 
Thanks again.
 
Barry Lay
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 18 Jan 90 18:05:27 GMT
From: mcsun!ukc!harrier.ukc.ac.uk!mtp@uunet.uu.net  (M.T.Paley)
Subject: TOS executable file format
Message-ID: <3651@harrier.ukc.ac.uk>
 
Does anyone know the exact format of executable files? The initial 20 or so
bytes are easy to decypher but I cannot find any information on the layout
of the symbol table and especially the relocation information.
 
I am trying to make a program to run TOS executables from within MINIX which
looks fairly easy except for actually producing an executable image in
memory from a mysterious .ttp file.
 
Any information would be usefull.
 
                Matthew
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 18 Jan 90 15:06:07 GMT
From: mcsun!unido!laura!klute%heike.informatik.uni-dortmund.de@uunet.uu.net
 (Rainer Klute)
Subject: VIP Professional, Streaks on the screen
Message-ID: <1908@laura.UUCP>
 
In article <90Jan16.202216est.57898@ugw.utcs.utoronto.ca>
 FCTY7284@RYERSON.BITNET ("Hiscocks, Peter") writes:
>I'm running VIP on a Mega 2, mono screen, and the display gets horizontal
> streaks at random places. I dimly remember this as being related to the
> blitter, but turning it off has no effect. Any ideas from net land?
>                                   Peter
 
Hmm, do you have GDOS (or equivalent) loaded? Without GDOS VIP
runs quite fine on my ST (except that it is awfully slow, as we
all know).
 
  Dipl.-Inform. Rainer Klute      klute@heike.informatik.uni-dortmund.de
  Univ. Dortmund, IRB             klute@unido.uucp, klute@unido.bitnet
  Postfach 500500         |)|/    ...uunet!mcvax!unido!klute
D-4600 Dortmund 50        |\|\    Tel.: +49 231 755-4663
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 22 Jan 90 04:22:09 GMT
From:
 jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!omicron.cs.fsu.edu!fsucs.cs.fsu.edu
 !boyd@rutgers.edu  (Mickey Boyd)
Subject: Wordup 2.0
Message-ID: <9001220423.AA02669@fsucs.cs.fsu.edu>
 
Anybody received the new version of Wordup?  What new features does it have?
What bugs were fixed?  Postscript output?  Inquiring minds want to know!!
 
 
--
 
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
    ---------------------------------+-------------------------------------
         Mickey Boyd                 |    "Nobody can be exactly like me.
                                     |      Even I have trouble doing it."
             FSU Comp Sci            |              - Tallulah Bankhead
    ---------------------------------+-------------------------------------
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
 
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End of INFO-ATARI16 Digest V90 Issue #78
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