Who likes manga?

Manga 0.31 works fine for me! (still Pi0, RO5.24)

Is it just me, or has CloudFlare broken MangaReader.net?

It seems to drop the ball partway through fetching stuff (after the transfer speed descends to zero with each block received). It’s not much better using a browser, fetching a page of Azumi (in Firefox) did work, but it took a shade under a minute…

Seems OK for me. I’m still on 0.27 but everything seems to be behaving itself.

Maybe it’s a geographical issue? Maybe Cloudflare’s CDN is shonkier than normal? Maybe they don’t like Frenchies? Who knows?

But the number of times Manga was freezing drove me crazy). Twice, because when TaskKilled, it would leave open incomplete files. Grrr…

So I did something about it. But you’ll need to use SecureSockets (for now) as AcornSSL doesn’t work (for me) in non-blocking mode.

Update will be offered by Manga, or you can get it from http://heyrick.ddns.net/manga/

There’s an !!ReadFirst file that explains the issue. I’ll quote that below as it makes more sense than the entries in the Versions file…

MANGA WAS FREEZING WHEN TRYING TO FETCH FILES?

The mangareader website has become horribly slow and unreliable for me. Chris
Mahoney (on ROOL forum) reports everything is okay for him, so it may be a
geographical issue (they've recently switched to cloudflare for their CDN).

At any rate, if you are one of the ones affected by Manga freezing when trying
to fetch/read manga, this v0.32 update will help you.

FIRST THING - YOU *MUST* BE USING SECURESOCKETS. The AcornSSL implementation
does not currently work non-blocking, so that will hang, there's no way around
that, that's what blocking means. :-)


IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THE ACORNSSL BETA:

You don't need to do anything. Skip ahead to Fetching Stuff.



IF YOU HAVE ACORNSSL BUT DON'T NEED IT RUNNING:

You cannot have AcornSSL loaded when starting Manga, as it will use that by
preference even if SecureSockets is loaded.

Open Manga's !Run file and locate this:

  | Comment out the following two lines if you don't need AcornSSL running
  | X RMKill AcornSSL
  | RMLoad <Manga$Dir>.SecureG

Remove the '|' from the RMKill and RMLoad lines, then save !Run.

Skip to Fetching Stuff.



IF YOU HAVE ACORNSSL AND NEED IT RUNNING:

If you need to have AcornSSL running, there's a way to override the default
behaviour.
First, let's ensure SecureSockets is available. Open Manga's !Run file and
locate this:

  | If you need AcornSSL running, comment out the following line and be
  | sure to start Manga whilst holding the 'S' key (to force SecureSockets).
  | RMLoad <Manga$Dir>.SecureG

Remove the '|' from the RMLoad line, then save !Run.

When you start Manga, do so WHILE HOLDING DOWN THE 'S' KEY. This will force
Manga to use SecureSockets.



FETCHING STUFF:

Fetching stuff now has a five second timeout. If the fetcher pops up the "I'm
doing something" window, then you'll be told that there was a timeout, though
you could probably see the fetch status freeze up.

If precaching, the fetch will fail silently, and trying to go to the next page
will cause it to become a foreground fetch (the precache won't retry the same
fetch). When you successfully fetch a page, the precache will be invoked for
the one following.
It's a bit hit and miss if the fetch will be successful, so don't worry if the
precache doesn't always succeed.



AND FINALLY...

At any rate, Manga should no longer freeze and need to be task-killed, leaving
incomplete open files. Well, so long as you're using SecureSockets. :-)


I've just been reading "Cats are facing west". It's not as slick as it used to
be thanks to the server flakiness, but Manga copes with it, we just need a
little bit of patience...


Rick, 2018/09/21

Just to clarify something – Manga has three fetchers built in. The first is http, not important. The second is AcornSSL. This has not been modified – no point as it’s blocking. The third is SecureSockets. This is the one that has been modified to support the above features.

I hope to poke around (Real Soon Now™) and see if I can work out what’s happening with AcornSSL’s non-blocking and why it is returning gibberish error messages.

Maybe it’s a geographical issue? Maybe Cloudflare’s CDN is shonkier than normal? Maybe they don’t like Frenchies? Who knows?

If you like, you could ping 1.1.1.1 and see what sort of response time you get.

Updated to v0.33 – in the usual place and on !Store.

• Now copes with putting the window to the top of the image when going to a new page of manga that uses the tall-strip format (the one I came across this with was “Song of the Cloud” with images something like 620×9000!).
• Now throws in the towel if the image is damaged, and displays the Blue Screen Of Woe (a message saying there’s no image) instead of trying to render gibberish.
• The main window menu (the one with the chapter numbers) has a new option “Refetch”. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Useful for trying to fix the above problem. ;-)

Is there a way to stop the ‘loading in progress’ sound?

Is there a way to stop the ‘loading in progress’ sound?

Patience? ;-)

If you mean the beep that happens when you click on the main window when it is still doing a fetch, then there is no official way to disable the beep.

Unofficially, however…

• Drop the executable (v1.33) into !Zap.
• F5 and go to address &12328.
• It’ll say “BL &0001AC30”.
• Replace that with NOP (a MOV R0,R0).
• Save.

For any other versions:

• Drop the !RunImage file into Zap (after making a backup copy).
• Switch to text (Ctrl-Shift-F1).
• Search for “main_clickhandler”.
• Switch to disassembly (Ctrl-Shift-F5).
• Press right arrow (should jump to the location of main_clickhandler).
• Scroll down slowly, looking for two comments in green on the right.
  The first will say string: “wimp.prefst” and the second call: message_read.
• The instruction immediately before that will be a BL. Go to that instruction.
• Arrow right, you’ll jump to a different part of the code, an STR instruction followed by SWI XOS_WriteI+7. If so, this is the right thing to change.

Now, to silence all Manga beeps that aren’t Wimp_ReportError beeps, make the XOS_WriteI+7 call be a NOP.

To silence only the beep if clicking while a fetch is in progress, arrow left to go back to the BL instruction in main_clickhandler and make that BL instruction be a NOP.

Job done.

:-)

0.33 works fine here. OTOH my net connection is so slow I hadn’t noticed mangareader being slow themselves.

Job done.

:)

I’m not sure it works like this, but please check if ‘double right’ will not go from page x to page x+2. when page x+1 doesn’t come, I tend to press keys several times.