232 Hale Road WIDNES Cheshire WA8 8QA Dear All, 7/3/92 I've had a slap on the wrist from Mark due to an oversight when send- ing material for the next ACC disc. I neglected to send DetachCLI.DOC when I mentioned it in my last letter to all ACC members (silly me!). Still, I hope that the New Library Helper and one or two other things found favour. While correcting the oversight, I received a letter from a coder in County Durham who had only just obtained ACC 1-4 (how's that for a blast from the past!). Apparently I'm going to have to supply Ray Burt-Frost with an up- date file to supply on future copies of ACC 1-4 informing users that the DOC DISCS (yes, the Encyclopedia Amigae from yours truly) are now discs plural, and not a single disc. So, if any ACC members are beset with slavering hordes beating down their drawbridges demanding the fabled DOC DISC of ACC 1-4, kindly tell them that it's now DOC DISCS (two of them) and to smother me with mail instead of vandalising your fortresses. Give them my address above, and tell them that a MANDATORY requirement is TWO blank discs plus a stamped, self-addressed jiffy bag for return. Sorry, I'm out of boiling oil, you'll all have to find another supplier! Right now, I'm working on DOC files with a difference. Most Amigoids are happy and content to wrestle with the basic Amiga architecture (with the exception of rich coders with A3000 tower systems and 68040 accelerators who pose like mad generating floating-point Julia sets in five minutes). Some of the Amiga owners out there, however, possess something weird and wonderful in the trapdoor slots of their A500s (or in a special slot in their A2000s). The weird and wonderful (well, it's pretty horrid in my opinion!) is a PC card. Yes, some people have splurged valuable shekels filling the A500 trap door slot with a KCS PowerPC board. This oddity is a complete IBM PC compat- ible computer on a card, and allows Amiga owners to get to grips with the joy (or otherwise) of such programs as Lotus 1-2-3 (why the hell doesn't someone write an Amiga version? It would run far faster than the PC original!). Not content with that, some people want to use the Amiga to write PC software! Why? Well, Amigas multitask properly (allowing the programmer such delights as simultaneous running of the text editor, the cross assembler and the downloader) and won't crash if the PC crashes (just reset the PC and con- tinue as before). Also, tracers for the PC that talk to the Amiga (which are light years ahead of the PC's DEBUG, allowing control of the 8086 via an In- tuition interface) exist that can run alongside all of the other Amiga soft- ware being used, thus making development a peach. The only problem is that these souls are a tad left out in the cold thus far. These poor people have to splurge yet more money on an MS-DOS man- ual (£40 or so) and even more money if they're unfortunate enough to have an 80286 PC add-on and are trying to write for Windows (a sort of PC equivalent of Intuition that looks sick by comparison and chews up EIGHT MEGS of valua- ble hard disc space!). Well, once again the manic DOC file writer comes to the rescue. Hello MS-DOS! Now, instead of blowing £40 on an MS-DOS manual, all you need is the old favourite:a blank disc and a stamped, self-addressed jiffy bag. Send them to the above address, marking your envelope/jiffy bag with the words: Amiga/PC BridgeBoard DOCS and a COMPLETE DOC file of MS-DOS internals (what functions to call, which registers take which parameters etc) is yours! And you can spend the £40 on something better than an MS-DOS manual (such as a "user friendly" Garfield soft toy to stick onto your monitor and still have enough cash for 20 blank discs, or if your sex life is somewhat exotic, 200 square feet of polythene sheeting and an industrial size drum of Swarfega). A2000 owners with a PC BridgeBoard will find the files handy, espec- ially if they're trying to write a fix to allow them to bolt a 200 meg hard disc onto the PC Bridge Board and use it for Amiga stuff, thus saving a huge sum of money because PC hard drives are about half the price of Amiga ones. Oh, yes. While we're at it, does ANYONE know how to write a driver for hard drives? I'm thinking about 2,7 RLL and ESDI jobs that come on PCs (SCSI com- patible) and come in sizes up to 2 gigabytes (and cost less than £800 because they're listed as PC drives - if they find their way into an Amiga catalogue you kiss goodbye to £1500 quicker than the VAT man said "How tickled I'm not" to Ken Dodd). Oh, and if anyone REALLY wants me to write an 8086 cross assembler, write to me and we can negotiate a fee...do you think I'm going to give you £200 worth of development software free AS WELL as the DOCS? If you do, I've a nice set of really cheap earthquake insurance policies that you might be interested in... Anyway, the files I am working on are called: typed_MSDOS.doc typed_MSDOS_extras.doc and will be available soon (and no, I don't mean 'soon' in the same sense as 'coming soon - the Microdrive' in case anyone remembers that debacle, these files are already two-thirds complete and awaiting editing and final colla- tion). Anyone who's running an A500 with a KCS PowerPC or an A2000 plus the BridgeBoard, and wants a cheap MS-DOS manual, please contact me! In fact, as I finish them, I'll pass them on to Mark for evaluation & review in a future ACC disc. In the meantime, I've supplied a piece of source code to do something quite amazing (well, as far as the Amiga is concerned, it's amazing), namely format a disc. Now I know that on some machines formatting a disc takes rela- tively little effort because all that you have to do is specify a value to be written to the disc over and over again, and the operating system will do the rest. Amiga discs, however, are complicated and highly organised. Any applic- ation program wishing to format discs according to the AmigaDOS standard MUST follow a fairly arcane procedure to ensure that the format is correct (since AmigaDOS makes a number of checks to ensure that the disc IS of the correct format). Those of you who have seen the Amiga System Programmer's Guide & have seen the horrors of the Amiga disc format, wondering if it is EVER possible to write code to generate this format, take heart. Look at the files: Format_Code.i Format_Code.DOC for more information. The first is an include file (PowerPacked, of course), that can be used within one's own programs PROVIDED that certain conditions are met (explained fully in the DOC file). The DOC file explains how to use the code, and how the code works. For those who haven't seen the Amiga System Programmer's Guide, and don't know how an Amiga disc is formatted, then the DOC file should open up some of the mysteries involved. Ok, that should be enough for now, as I have a couple of minor prob- lems to iron out with some other code I've written, and about which more will be said in the future, and I also have a couple of MAJOR ideas to try out in fields such as language translation and 3D graphics now that I've had a re- think after performing a post-mortem on some failed code. So, until we meet again, Live fast, code hard & die in a beautiful way Dave Edwards.