Alfred

How do you disassemble a large ROM file ? I tried RAW but it doesn't work and other modes complain about missing segments. Is there a way to disassemble a plain ROM that has no binary header ?

What BBS programs ? I think BBS 850 Express is the only one I know of that was done in Action!.

Speaking of which you might want to look on Carsten's wiki and check Action! bugsheet #3 and make sure the fixes are applied to your runtime library.

That grey screen of his looks like what I was seeing using RDT to the VM. Interestingly enough, it also occurs using RDT to a real machine, in this case one of the Intel NUC boxes with a J4005 cpu running W10 Pro. Switching to fullscreen brings the display back and upon switching back to windowed view the screen stays good for the life of the session. So I don't think it's particular to a VM, but perhaps due to crappy graphics hardware. This particular NUC is rather weak, it can barely run the Delphi IDE.

A good case in point, although it has nothing to do with hardware really is BBS Express Pro!. Now that Carden's gone, what happens to it ? Should I release my source-level disassembly of the main bbs program and some of it's modules, or should I just sit on them and hope someone else takes over from Steve ? Or the multiplexer boards. I suppose I could ask Bob if he still has the films from which the boards were made. The hard part for them is sourcing the 6522 VIA; they were hard to come by back then, Bob used to complain about how hard it was to find them all the time, I have no idea if you can still get them today.

No, it’s not fixed. The variable is called device and you’re correct in that it’s expected to be zero. I’m not sure that it’s really mentioned anywhere that it needs to be zeroed at program startup. I believe it is mentioned in the runtime library documentation, but not the fact that it needs to be set to zero or whatever iocb you're going to use for your sysout. Unfortunately Action! doesn't have any sort of initialization section where this sort of thing can be done, so the programmer has to do it in their startup code.

It's the cartridge that produces the standalone binary, so it has the issue. Search the cart for the hex bytes 6,$02E2,$02E3 and change the last four to $02E0,$02E1 and your problem is fixed.

He's not directly involved but his version of SDX is used with most of these upgrades, if I understand correctly. If he were to disappear, who would take it over ? Nobody is my guess.

Shouldn't need to restart, just jump through DOSVEC. That might kill the execution of a batch file though. Easier just to fix the init address using DiskRX or it's like. Or fix your cartridge rom, it's easy to find the vector since it only occurs once in the cartridge.

Konrad dba Drac030

The fact that Action! uses the init vector for binaries instead of the run vector causes some problems. I altered my cartridges years ago to use the run vector.

There's no need to reverse anything while the authors are still around and active. If KMK falls headfirst into an old well, then I suppose we might have to revisit the issue.

Yes, the above code doesn't exist in my copy. Mine would be the precursor and possible first couple versions of SDX, say 4.17 and 4.18. I don't see any reference to super maps, so presumably that came later. Since a map sector spans 32K, presumably POINTing wasn't such a big deal except in the case of large ARC type files, Gustafson probably though the extra code wasn't worth the effort. Apart from those, how often are you going to run into a 32K+ file that you're going to do a lot of jumping around in ? BBS message board might be the only thing.

That's not entirely true, it did make a bit of an attempt to see if where it was was closer than starting over: ; Absolute position within file ; ----------------------------- ; in: ; addoff = file position ; NOTES: ; This routine first checks if it is closer to start at ; the beginning, so it does. Otherwise, it will calculate ; an offset and use xrpos instead. pos clc ; temp = filpos / 2 ldx #2 psh lda filpos,x ror a sta temp,x dex bpl psh jsr caddtem ; if addoff > filpos/2 then bcc isrel ; do relative positioning ; closer to start at begnning ldy #chasms ; smsec = chain (first sector map) jsr move

I see. I wonder why Carden jumped to v5, or were there other versions he produced? Anyway, I have produced a fully binary compatible version of the bbs resident kernel. Been testing it last couple of days, and I haven’t found any problems so far with the few modules I have tried. At some point I will make it available to any Pro sysops that are interested.

Probably. As the doctor mentions above there’s the BC (Before Carden) era which I guess is 2.1. I see in the code it looks for a version 3 as well. I’m not familiar with the history of Pro, so I don’t know what’s the last version Keith did.

I looked at that list and what I found interesting is all the Pro! boards are old, version 2.1a. Nobody seems to be running 5.0 or the 7.0.

Instead of always reinventing the wheel, if someone wanted to port some flavour of *nix over, why not do Minix ? It's relatively simple, was designed as teaching OS and the guy even published a book (which I have) of how the whole thing works. Seems like a good place to start if you're into that sort of thing. 15K doesn't seem like much space for a process workspace.

It’s my understanding that there is some sort of process in place that deals with adding a node to the network. You can’t just blindly join, if the existing group says no, you’re out. If that is true, that would seem to take care of duplicate nodes.

So for those running a BBS, who runs BBS Express Pro! ? And just in general, who runs a telephone line bbs and who runs a TCP/IP bbs, either via Altirra or a Lantronics or similar device ?

Yes, the BBS50.COM code is atrocious, jump to branches, all sorts of nonsense. I have my marked up disassembly that produces an exact duplicate of the BBS50 exe. Now I just need to do the same to the main modules, and confirm they don't have any internal dependency on the bbs50 code, and then a vanilla express can be released.

No, it's nothing to do with copy-protection, that's in the Stage 1 vertical blank and the startup-code. It will be simple enough to remove that, and the system will just accept whatever node number is in the sysdata.dat file.

Thanks for that. Looking at the LOGONx.CMD I see that the Pro! nodes 230, 53 and 47 are special in that if you call one of those three system, they will ask you for your Pro! serial number when you apply to be a user. Only those nodes ask, so I'm guessing maybe they are original support bbs systems ? Do these nodes even still exist ?

Here's a bug in the latest 3.6: When you delete the first user equate that you added, it deletes it from the box, but the next time you open the user equates, it's back. You can delete any other equates and they stay deleted, but the very first one you create, no matter how many times you delete it, it always comes back.

The module suffixes I listed are from the Pro 5.0b system.