Recent Posts

Topic: General / Drive Icon Query.

Thanks, *share works fine.

Topic: General / Drive Icon Query.

You can’t share ‘removable’ drives from the iconbar menu since you might remove them whilst someone else on the network is accessing them.

The ability to disconnect the machine from the network or switch it off has always existed and has the same effect.
The ability to share from the command line rather makes a mockery of the limitation.
Either “do, or do not” as the saying goes. I can share a Memphis “disc” which is pretty ephemeral.

Topic: General / Newbie software questions

Well, I finally got my Pi through today – and the seller hadn’t included a RiscOs card! Not to worry though, follow the instructions on the website, and got an image set up no problem at all. And since I’m writing this from my Pi, I can safely say it is working like a dream. I really must give my respects to the Open Riscos team (and the Raspberry Pi foundation) on doing a fantastic job. I am genuinely really, REALLY impressed :)

Topic: General / Drive Icon Query.

Is there any reason why “removable” drives or those not in SCSI::4 can’t be shared?

You can’t share ‘removable’ drives from the iconbar menu since you might remove them whilst someone else on the network is accessing them. The *Share command still works though, so you can put that in an Obeyfile and either double-click it or make it part of your boot sequence.

Topic: General / Drive Icon Query.

I share up to three drives from my BeagleBoard and PandaBoard, and two from the Pi, but in all cases they are shared using the *share command, rather than from the drive icon, which I think, without checking, that the menu option is greyed out.

Topic: General / Drive Icon Query.

You mean “share” via ShareFS? Just use the command “*share”. Don’t know why it is not supported via the drive icon.

Topic: General / Drive Icon Query.

Following further investigations, the 16Gb stick also appears as a fixed drive on a PC running Vista.
Trying running two RPis on the same network.
Enabled network and access from the boot config on both.
With only the wired stick, I get share as an option and if selected, I can read it on the second RPi.
Now plugged in second stick and share is greyed out for that one. Still in PC format though.
Used !HForm.
Now whichever drive is registered first, as SCSI::4 can be shared, but not the other one in SCSI::5.
The wired drive is in a higher USB slot than any I plug in.

The same applies if I use a 250Gb portable harddrive instead.
I can also share RAMdiscs if they have unique names.
Is there any reason why “removable” drives or those not in SCSI::4 can’t be shared?

Topic: General / IIC ACK?

How much current does that display module draw? Very little, I’d expect, but have you tried to measure it?

Just measured it at four settings. The display has 256 discrete “Contrast” settings (for our purposes, contrast = brightness) though it seems that the larger the value, the less difference it makes. The default setting is halfway, and there isn’t much between that and full brightness.

Readings taken from the OLED connected to a RaspberryPi, powered from 3.3V, with all pixels lit.

Minimum brightness (0x00) - 13.7mA
Low brightness (0x3F)     - 29mA
Middle/default brightness - 33.3mA
Higher brightness         - 35.2mA
Maximum brightness        - 36.2mA

Because the display is self-illuminating, I find the defalt medium brightness to be quite sufficient. Especially when you consider that the ‘on’ pixels glow and the ‘off’ pixels barely reflect. I just held my phone’s bright LED torch right up to the display and it was still perfectly readable.

Topic: General / CDROM device and CDFS numberings

StrongHelp “OS” manual has all the info. For old time stuff, look for Acorn application notes 273 and 293. PRM 5a has a CDFS section, but does not detail SWI calls, but only star cmds. “We will soon replace CDFS2 with a serious CD filing system” – fat chance.

One of the best docs is the cdfs driver construction SDK from the early years, but this was never freely available.

Topic: General / CDROM device and CDFS numberings

You young ones these days want it on a plate 8)

Given that I retired (sic) a few years ago that’s the nicest compliment I’ve had today! ;→

Thanks for the link. :-)

Jim

Topic: General / Painless way of copying Filecore hard disks for archiving

Ah, FidoMail…I still miss it. When Fidonet died and Internet Mail/Usenet took over, it was a long and hard way from the extremely nice user experience FidoMail provided to the harsh reality of ReadNews, TTFN, Newsbase and finally Messenger (Pro). Only real problem of FidoMail was its limit of the 16 MB message base.

I guess Fido people migrating from DOS still miss the nicety of GoldED…

Topic: General / CDROM device and CDFS numberings

Can you point me at a URL, please for ones on CDFS/CD swis?

You young ones these days want it on a plate 8)

Google is your friend, or not, as you prefer. I entered ‘risc os stronghelp manual’ and the first entry in the returned list was

http://www.riscos.info/downloads/stronghelp/manuals/

That contains a large list of various manuals, including the ones I mentioned.

Added: os336 is probably one you might need.

Topic: General / Painless way of copying Filecore hard disks for archiving

If you have a Pi, the best is probably to use it as a NFS server, under RISC OS. I do that on my Pandaboard. It’s a bit a surprise, but as NFS + web server, RISC OS is rock stable.

I’ll probably use it soon as media server soon, with remote control via OSCliD. The only problem is the FTP server : it crashes after a few hours. Strange.

Topic: General / Game pad and joystick support

Games need to go through an application layer module which hooks into JoystickV. Modules being Joystick / VOTI and RTFM module emulators and a new one (or extend Joystick) that we need to define which supports feedback etc

Topic: Code review / Learning C on RISC-OS

I was very happy to find this thread yesterday:

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/1835

… and most importantly, a working example of a “WIMP Hello World program” using OSLib mentioned in there, to be found here:

http://www.sfryatt.eclipse.co.uk/temp/wimp.html

Thank you, thank you, especially Steve in this case. I was pulling my hair to figure out how to use the the OSLib library for things like WIMP programming. To be honest the examples supplied with OSLib are pretty useless.

Slowly, very slowly I’m starting to see how things (can) work in C !!!

So, to resume, I think I’ll made a reasonably good choice with my gcc + OSLib setup and I’m going to stick with that until I have enough experience to write my own library (wink : Rick!)

I’m sure that there are many others, too — many developers just seem to write their own…

I guess it’s the problem when we are all used to the grotty parts of task management because that’s “just how BASIC rolls”, and we all think we can all write a better library… ;-)

I definately recognise what you said, I’ve been doing that in BASIC as well…

Funny enough I see you experienced guys indeed all making your own: Rick adapted DeskLib, Steve wrote his own…

I think I’ll use just OSLib without OSLib support for the moment, I like the idea of still having a bit of a feel what’s going on. Too many layers, like maybe another event lib might confuse me even more.

Topic: General / CDROM device and CDFS numberings

There are also some StrongHelp ‘programming’ manuals with some info.

Can you point me at a URL, please for ones on CDFS/CD swis? I do have a stronghelp manual for CDFS / CDFSDriver 2.21 by David Thomas (2 Jun 1996) which is clearly old and incomplete. Apart from that some old text lists of swis for CD_ from May 2002, also incomplete. Neither cover the different modes for CD_ReadAudio. Hence my bafflement at your question!

I wrote ClassicRip for two reasons. One is the obvious: I wanted a ripper that was more convenient for use on ‘classical music’ CDs. This is because I have a lot of old home-recorded CDRs made using an AudioCD recorder of concerts, etc mainly Radio3. Wanted to get more organised and put these onto harddisc.[¹]

The other is to help me understand the CD_/CDFS_ swis well enough to document them and outline/example their use. I’m still working on the ‘ROSS’ documents I want to produce. Having released a rough draft of where I’d got to some months ago I started on the audio CD and realised I didn’t understand it or have decent/reliable documents. So started looking at writing a ripper as an aid to learning.

At that point Colin and Dave started implimenting USB Audio. 8-] That was too exciting to miss or ignore, so I put CD on pause whilst I got involved in helping testing that and writing some demos. Now that’s working nicely I’ve gone back to CD! Once this is clear I’ll add both CD and USB Audio to the document I’m writing and make the newer, extended version public for people to criticise. ;→

[ Which also means that at some point I’ll have to start asking when the USB Audio will get into the ROOL OS releases… ;→ ]

Jim

[¹] More recently I’ve taken to making 96k/24 recordings direct to files. Better quality and dodges the limitations of AudioCD. e.g. no problem recording an entire concert without any gaps. I still buy audio CDs, though. But then I still buys some LPs as well. 8-]

Topic: General / CDROM device and CDFS numberings

Where is better documentation?

I have gleaned some info from newsgroups etc over the years. There are also some StrongHelp ‘programming’ manuals with some info. The CDFS manual is fairly sparse in detail. The StrongHelp OS manual has a section on CD and CDFS. The info I posted earlier came from that one. I use OSLib and there is a StrongHelp manual for that as well, although the detail in that is primarily focussed on using the calls.

As far as I undersand it, if using the mode 0 lba mode, you do not have to worry about using times or offsets, just the start block and number of blocks to read. The details of start block for a track and length of track can be found from other calls such as cd_enquire_one_track (an oslib function based upon the corresponding SWI), but it is a long time since I wrote my ripper, so memory is a bit hazy without getting back into the source code.

Topic: Community Support / Filename length (again)

but then when you go to do a backup to SCSI::Backup2014.$.HardDisc4.April.14 those few extra characters push it over the limit.

Yes, I think that was what was happening in the original problem. The primary and secondary paths were at the top – ADFS::HD4a.$ and ADFS::HD4b.$ but a scrapdir was being used on a NAS device at a much lower level in the dir tree and attempts to move deleted files there provoked the nastiness.

Topic: Community Support / Filename length (again)

More to the point, who seriously needs file names that long (as provokes the original problem)?

The problem is, they are being generated automatically by, presumably, WebGet when it fetches the files. Here is one of the shorter leaf names – there will be the discname and top level dirs in front of this of course.

~tmpl~component~amp~link~aHR0cDovL3d3dy5NYWdoZXJhR2VuZ
WFsb2d5Lm9yZy9pbmRleC5waHAvb3RoZXJyZXNvdXJjZXMvNTMtbmV
3c3BhcGVycy84Ni1tYWdoZXJhZmVsdC1xdWFydGVyLXNlc3Npb25z
LTI4LWp1bmUtMTg3My5odG1s

(Maybe that won’t format properly so I have put in some LFs).

Topic: Community Support / Filename length (again)

More to the point, who seriously needs file names that long (as provokes the original problem)?

Yeah, and who would ever need more than 77 files in a directory, right? ;-)

It’s pretty easy to end up with long file/path names without even realising it. E.g. look through one of the OS source archives and see how deep some of the directory paths get. But you might not know that when you extract the archive, so you might place it in some deep subfolder on your hard disc (ADFS::HardDisc4.$.JoeBloggs.SourceCode.ROOL.OMAP3.FixingSomeHorribleBug.14_04_2014 … etc.) and then bang! you hit a buffer length limit hidden deep within the OS and everything dies horribly. Or maybe you can extract the archive OK, but then when you go to do a backup to SCSI::Backup2014.$.HardDisc4.April.14 those few extra characters push it over the limit.

Topic: General / Game pad and joystick support

so feel free to change any if it or replace with something better.

Muhahahaha!

• It’s probably better to keep the reason code and joystick ID in separate registers. That way it’s less work for vector claimants to work out whether they need to process the call or not.
• If the joystick driver uses reason code 3 to report changes in inputs, how are those values passed on to the game? Does the game need to sit on the vector? Or is a layer needed to buffer the values so that a SWI can return them to the game? Does the SWI return a queue of events, or just the current control value?
• What about interfaces where control updates must be polled for, rather than reported via interrupts as per USB?
• How are reason codes 5/6 going to work? You’ll probably need something similar to PointerV 1 where each driver appends its information to a linked list – so the entry parameters should be a null pointer in R1.

Also, you need to take into account how games are going to use the API. Making it easy for games (or other software) to use should really be the driving factor in the design, at least for the bits which the game is meant to interface with.

One thing which I think would be nice from a games perspective would be an OS_ReadVduVariables-type call, where you give it a joystick ID, a list of inputs you want to read, and a buffer for the results. Advantages:

• The game can easily read all the controls it’s interested in in one call, instead of (e.g.) keyboard input where lots of OS_Byte calls are needed.
• It’ll also be a nice atomic operation, so there aren’t any edge cases where (e.g.) a joystick could be unplugged in the middle of reading input, or if the user is doing some intense button-mashing then the results won’t get confused and say that he was pressing both up and down at the same time when really he was pressing each one in turn. Not very likely scenarios, but might be useful in some situations (accurate motion prediction from accelerometer data? if you’ve got a bunch of accelerometers/gyros I’d imagine that sampling them all at exactly the same time would be important to reduce errors when making rapid movements).
• If the Joystick module isn’t buffering the inputs internally, then reading all the controls via one OS_ReadVduVariables-style call would result in just one call over the Joystick vector, helping to keep down on vector traffic and keep the whole thing nice and streamlined.

Topic: General / Game pad and joystick support

That’s just a rough idea of the sort of API I was expecting, so feel free to change any if it or replace with something better.

Topic: General / Painless way of copying Filecore hard disks for archiving

I do have a Pi, except I only picked up the 4GB Noobs card. RO needs the 8GB card (unless I write out a custom one).

Sounds like that might be the best option, booting into RO on the Pi and slinging everything across the network.

As I said in the OP, if I can get everything dragged off the 4-slice RPC (which was my development machine) there’ll be some interesting sources released into the public domain. Anyone remember FidoMail?

Topic: General / Game pad and joystick support

I’m a believer in not making things more long winded than they should be.
Codes 5 and 6 can be merged. Get a device count (R0) and pointer (R1) to device list in one SWI call.

Topic: General / Game pad and joystick support

API needs to be something along the lines of:

JoystickV

Entry:

Reason codes:

Reason code 1:

Reason code 2:

Reason code 3:

Reason code 4:

Reason code 5:

Reason code 6:

Device capabilities list:

A list of device buttons etc, terminated with FFFFFFFF

Input Types: