exxosuk Posted October 20, 2015 Share Posted October 20, 2015 Myself and my girlfriend have spend many days in reorganising the floppyshop database into a online searchable one. The entire floppyshop gold series is now online with a searchable database and every file is downloadable. http://exxoshost.co.uk/atari/PDL/FLOPPYSHOP/index.htm I had to put captcha in there to stop leechers as there are some GB's of files. I don't know why people leeching the stuff on my site as mostly the ISO's are available on other sites anyway. Anyway, you can search by key word or phrase, or browse the entire section. Keywords are highlighted in the search results. Be warned that the browse section can output a LOT of pages, so if you have a crappy PC it will most probably crash it. In that case, tough Search results can be limited to 10 or 50 results anyway. There are a lot of disk (mostly ST ones) where the info was just one large block of text. But it is separated into separate lines on the Falcon disks. I'm not going to spend time on tidying up the ST info's at least not anytime soon, as there are thousands of files where there can be several or more programs on each floppy, thats a huge undertaking. A lot of text files I had to write scripts to extract the info and sort it out into separate disk chunks. That took a huge amount of time in itself. I also was planning on having a SQL database for this stuff, but after doing some testing, it was over 10 times faster to do a simple text file read and read in the whole file and parse it than calling a single read on a SQL database. Sometimes SQL was over 100 times slower, probably a slow down in opening up a connection to the database. Anyway, after much faffing about, I just went with plain text files for the database. At least then making changes to text files is easy, and I don't have to write a script to do the changes The timings were done in milliseconds, so either method is fast anyway. But for this particular setup, text file database is a whole lot easier and faster. The site needs cookies and javascript to work. It works on current browsers. I tried not to use anything to fancy function wise. Strangely there are still a huge amount of hits on my site using FF3 and IE6. I'm not going to start checking stuff on older browsers, lifes to short In anycase, AFAIK there isn't any bugs, but no doubt there will be some somewhere.. If the site screws up unexpectedly, I may be working on the scripts, but probably will be no tweaks until I get some bug reports back from people. Once the core is stable (It should be now anyway) I may look into putting up other PDL's online in a similar way. I guess it depends if people find the site useful or not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Faucon_2001 Posted October 20, 2015 Share Posted October 20, 2015 Thanks a lot, great and useful work ! Philippe Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Android8675 Posted October 20, 2015 Share Posted October 20, 2015 So awesome, keep up the good work! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari74user Posted October 20, 2015 Share Posted October 20, 2015 Exxos, that's awesome, good ol' Floppyshop! Now I appreciate why you needed that logo! Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted October 20, 2015 Author Share Posted October 20, 2015 Exxos, that's awesome, good ol' Floppyshop! Now I appreciate why you needed that logo! Thanks hehe yep - Had to have the logo, its a part of the history I hope to get FaST Club collection online next, but might not be finished until the new year. I hope eventually to get more PDL's online over the coming year Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ataricrypt Posted October 20, 2015 Share Posted October 20, 2015 I've been waiting of this - absolutely awesome stuff Chris. Thank you Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted October 20, 2015 Author Share Posted October 20, 2015 I've been waiting of this - absolutely awesome stuff Chris. Thank you Forgot to mention its stable now 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheNameOfTheGame Posted October 21, 2015 Share Posted October 21, 2015 Nice! Thanks for hosting this resource! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari74user Posted October 21, 2015 Share Posted October 21, 2015 (edited) hehe yep - Had to have the logo, its a part of the history I hope to get FaST Club collection online next, but might not be finished until the new year. I hope eventually to get more PDL's online over the coming year Further good news, my favourite PD Libraries from back in the day, followed by perhaps LAPD, them Merlin Edited October 21, 2015 by Atari74user Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted October 21, 2015 Author Share Posted October 21, 2015 LAPD - well AFAIK the guy who brought out LAPD is never going release the collection, I was in contact with him some years ago, he seemed more interested in continuing to run LAPD, which is fine, but I doubt he would get any sales these days, he also has no time for it, and with floppys ages.. most probably dont work anymore. its not overly looking good Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted October 21, 2015 Author Share Posted October 21, 2015 I forgot to say, the only other PDL I have are "Folders PDL" "suzy B" and "crawly crypt" not clue what is on those yet, but those are the only other collections I have and are aware of. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari74user Posted October 22, 2015 Share Posted October 22, 2015 LAPD - well AFAIK the guy who brought out LAPD is never going release the collection, I was in contact with him some years ago, he seemed more interested in continuing to run LAPD, which is fine, but I doubt he would get any sales these days, he also has no time for it, and with floppys ages.. most probably dont work anymore. its not overly looking good Still trying to run LAPD, I didn't realise it still existed, kudos to the guy, but a little bit of an odd business decision. Suzy B and Crawly Crypt I believe are avalilable at Info-coach, but you can't download at folder level. I don't have a CD-ROM anymore, I tried to stick the CDs in my PC laptop, didn't seem to want to read them, although my previous laptop was fine. I have been meaning to Google ISO standards and why I cannot read my Atari CD-ROMs on my laptop, I see no reason, only that my laptop is running bloody Vista and is kicking on a little Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted October 22, 2015 Author Share Posted October 22, 2015 I've had a lot of trouble in the past with CD drives. Mostly a cheap CD-ROM reads everything, but CDRW drives never seem to be as good for some reason. I used to have CDROM and a CDRW because the CDRW wouldn't read a lot of CDR's. Cheap disks, buggy drives, etc etc. Pretty normal these days. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari74user Posted October 22, 2015 Share Posted October 22, 2015 I've had a lot of trouble in the past with CD drives. Mostly a cheap CD-ROM reads everything, but CDRW drives never seem to be as good for some reason. I used to have CDROM and a CDRW because the CDRW wouldn't read a lot of CDR's. Cheap disks, buggy drives, etc etc. Pretty normal these days. Actually, it's handy to know I am not alone! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted October 22, 2015 Author Share Posted October 22, 2015 Actually, it's handy to know I am not alone! I could write a book on it all I think the CDROM drive in my old PC in the loft had a really good drive in it, it would read just about anything. think it was a "lite on" or something like that. Though ironically, our DVD player uses a lite on RW drive and thats terrible lol Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari74user Posted October 22, 2015 Share Posted October 22, 2015 (edited) I could write a book on it all I think the CDROM drive in my old PC in the loft had a really good drive in it, it would read just about anything. think it was a "lite on" or something like that. Though ironically, our DVD player uses a lite on RW drive and thats terrible lol Hmmm, now that's an idea, there's a Lite-On at my dearest mother's house, I'll try that! Edited October 22, 2015 by Atari74user Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted October 22, 2015 Author Share Posted October 22, 2015 Hmmm, now that's an idea, there's a Lite-On at my dearest mothers house, I'll try that! Worth a try, The good old CDROM drives or DVDROM drives seem to handle iffy disks a lot better than RW drives. They are cheap enough that might be worth getting a couple to try out anyway. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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