4
http://sdx.atari8.info
As stated previously, there are no killer new features: the 4.43 is basically an improved and cleaned up 4.42. There are many changes all around the place, and not all of these are visible to the user: there are some internal improvements which facilitate future developments.
It is not that the development team has done almost nothing since the previous release. Just to give a clue, 837 days have passed since the 4.42 announcement, and CVS statistics say, that well over 400 source updates (commits) have been done since. To be specific, by strange coincidence, the number of commits is 443. This makes an average rate of 0,53 commits a day, i.e. once in each two days there was a change in the code.
Unfortunately, As always, not everything has been done which needs to be done. We decided, though, that the release should not be delayed anymore. The things which remain to fix will be fixed in subsequent versions. Also, the period of 4.43 development was definitely too long - we hope that subsequent versions will be released not less often than once in 6 months.
The detailed list of changes (and todos) is available as a plain text file whatsnew-443.txt. The file lists changes relative to SpartaDOS X 4.42. The size of the file is near to 17 KB. A brief overview of most important things is given below.
DLT would also like to thank all people who helped to release this version, that is: cooperating coders for coding and ideas, hardware guys for help, betatesters for bug reports and suggestions, authors of tools for the tools, and also users for feedback.
Special thanks go to GoodByteXL, who was working hard and patiently on the excellent and detailed SpartaDOS X User's Manual (Note: the release version of the manual is not yet uploaded, it will get uploaded soon; the PDF available on the page is a beta-manual).
== Most important news in SpartaDOS X 4.43 ==
* New Toolkit disk with additional utilities
* Improved hardware compatibility: SpartaDOS X now works on SECAM Ataris (equipped with FGTIA).
* Improved backward compatibility with SpartaDOS 3.2 and AtariDOS.
* Improved backward compatibility with 400/800 OS.
* Improved handling of AtariDOS/MyDOS disks.
* Improved compatibility with MAC/65 cartridge.
* Improved fast I/O driver for the California Access 2001 floppy drive (thanks to sup8pdct)
* SIO routines have been optimized to support transfers at higher speeds.
* "High" density added to the list of available densities in the Formatter.
* VBXE support: directory colorizing may be activated VBXE 80-column console. Also the formatter will cooperate with VBXE driver to avoid interference with 80-column VBXE display.
* Quite a few bugfixes all around the place.
Most important extensions to internal functions:
* It is now possible to read the Help key or Shift/Ctrl+key combos via U_GETKEY routine.
* MALLOC is now able to automatically align memory blocks to page boundary.
* U_LOAD is now able to automatically align binary blocks to page boundary (the SDX binary header defines an additional flag for that).
* New error condition: 183 Environment full (cure that by loading ENV.SYS)
Have fun.
Edited by drac030, Sun Apr 10, 2011 8:40 AM.
