cyco130

flashjazzcat, on Sun Apr 1, 2012 11:33 AM, said:

A very cool idea to make folder images came from drac030 last year. He e-mailed me about his Dos2Dos protocol, which is an Atari side driver for folder images that he uses for his Sio2Bsd program. Currently only a SDX driver is implemented but writing a Atari Dos/MyDos version seems straight forward. Check this info with Google Translate: http://atariki.krap....dex.php/DOS2DOS

optixx, on Tue Apr 10, 2012 12:17 PM, said:

Wow! Cool I always wanted to see AspeQt run on Mac OS X. I expect some screen shots after the testing is done. All the major platforms are covered now and AspeQt is the most portable Sio2Pc clone. If someone adds BSD and BeOS support, it'll be unbeatable

Official Ninja, on Tue Apr 10, 2012 8:52 PM, said:

I think it's a good idea. Many XEX loading screens don't like high speed SIO. Current loader, if no one has changed it yet, uses big transfer chunks (around 1K IIRC) which makes it work very fast when it does work but I can see that it can be a problem with some hardware/software combinations.

Many thanks to atari8warez and others for the updates. I wanted to comment on some recently raised issues.

Porting to Mac: AspeQt won't compile on a Mac yet. Someone needs to write a serial port backend for it. The Unix one should be a good start and most things except header file names and setSpeed ought to work. But setSpeed uses a Linux specific method to use non-standard serial port speeds. I would really like to see AspeQt run on a Mac natively.

Folder images: Coming up with a folder imaging scheme that is both efficient and compatible with a wide range of DOSes is not an easy task. One needs to analyze sector access patterns of different DOSes, or rebuild everything from scratch when a write occurs. I gave up at the time because I didn't have SpartaDos X. But on the PC side one can use Qt's QFileSystemWatcher to update the imaged folder automatically. That would solve most problems as long is folder images are readonly. Just rebuild the image when the file system reports change. But I really can't comment on write support.

Hi,

I want to apologize for my absence and unresponsiveness, which, it seems, will have to continue for a while due to personal stuff and to thank everybody contributing to AspeQt. Today I've granted admin rights to Peter and Ray for the sourceforge project. I've also tried the latest patches and I was pretty impressed (Except the uppercase file names; Linux is case-sensitive and I like CamelCasing my images, ha ha, feels good to criticize from the outside )

Even though hands on coding seems a little far fetched for now, I'll try my best to help with the internals (though I don't really remember that well how they were).

I'm very pleased to see the project back from the grave!

Regards,
Fatih.

PS: As with the folder images, it was just a quick hack, a different approach is necessary for more robust operation. Maybe drac030's Dos2Dos can be a good alternative to support. Without Atari-side awareness, anything I can think of is bound to fail in some circumstances.