Do you have disks with loose BASIC programs?

[tschak909]

Do you have a disk of random Atari BASIC stuff?

 

Let's get all of that copied.

 

Even with all the random bits of BASIC floating around on sites like Pigwa, there are still a lot of things missing.

 

-Thom

[+bob1200xl]

Not sure what you are looking for... ? What BASIC Stuff? Commercial programs? DOM stuff?

 

Bob

 

[tschak909]

Yes.

 

There are so many BASIC programs that aren't accounted for, and because people often saved these programs onto their own disks and combined them with others, these programs are often just sitting in dustbins, not preserved. There is a LOT of stuff, either commercial, or public-domain, that isn't preserved, and we need to scrape it all together and get it preserved.

 

-Thom

[www.atarimania.com]

Before I saw "tschak909", I thought I was suffering from some sort of split personality disorder and another part of myself posted that without the real me knowing 

[zzip]

Do you want homebrew BASIC stuff too people may have written BITD?

[tschak909]

11 minutes ago, zzip said:

Do you want homebrew BASIC stuff too people may have written BITD?

Yes. There is so much stuff unaccounted for. 

 

-Thom

[billkendrick]

I posted the 'best of' my junk a few years back... categorized and "screenshots" (terrible cellphone camera photos of my C=1902 monitor) even!  http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/atari/relics/

 

Don't judge... I was a kid.

[+DjayBee]

For a long time I have that dream ...

 

Somebody (not me - I am no coder) writes an application with a database.

 

You throw any Atari 8-bit artifact at it, it hashes the data and stores hash and data. As our 8-bits do not have huge files, the pure amount of data should not be a challenge for today's systems.

 

In further steps, it:

• analyses the file (disk image, a COM/XEX, a picture, you name it)
• converts it if needed (i.e. ATX -> ATR)
• normalizes what it has found (ATR vs. XFD or MAC/65 multi-segment-binary vs. contiguous binary, pictures to i.e. PNG, and so on)
• hashes and stores these as well
• extracts all sectors from disk images, hashes and stores (would be great for repairing bad disks)
• analyses disk images for their DOS (like atr_image_explorer.html does it), extracts all files and does the above for any of these files and keeps links to the disk images containing them
   
• finally you can query it with strings or hex-sequences or hashes or even "your" file and it will tell you if it is already in the database and what it is (and perhaps where you can find it on the net)

Any volunteers around? ?

[tschak909]

6 minutes ago, DjayBee said:

For a long time I have that dream ...

 

Somebody (not me - I am no coder) writes an application with a database.

 

You throw any Atari 8-bit artifact at it, it hashes the data and stores hash and data. As our 8-bits do not have huge files, the pure amount of data should not be a challenge for today's systems.

 

In further steps, it:

• analyses the file (disk image, a COM/XEX, a picture, you name it)
• converts it if needed (i.e. ATX -> ATR)
• normalizes what it has found (ATR vs. XFD or MAC/65 multi-segment-binary vs. contiguous binary, pictures to i.e. PNG, and so on)
• hashes and stores these as well
• extracts all sectors from disk images, hashes and stores (would be great for repairing bad disks)
• analyses disk images for their DOS (like atr_image_explorer.html does it), extracts all files and does the above for any of these files and keeps links to the disk images containing them
   
• finally you can query it with strings or hex-sequences or hashes or even "your" file and it will tell you if it is already in the database and what it is (and perhaps where you can find it on the net)

Any volunteers around? ?

With #FujiNet, This is now a viable reality, as there is now a direct way to do ingress.

 

You could, literally do:

 

READY
SAVE"N:HTTPS://ATARIDATABASE.COM/INBOX/FOO.BAS"
[]

 

I mean, seriously, THINK ABOUT THAT.

 

[zzip]

6 minutes ago, tschak909 said:

SAVE"N:HTTPS://ATARIDATABASE.COM/INBOX/FOO.BAS"

What stops you from overwriting somebody else's code?

[tschak909]

3 minutes ago, zzip said:

What stops you from overwriting somebody else's code?

You're thinking in terms of physical file-systems, don't.

 

there's nothing that says that the last component of a path has to be the final filename. It's a URL, an end-point.

 

If the server needs to re-name it? so be it.

 

To explain further, that SAVE command is an OPEN command with AUX1=8. This gets turned into a PUT request by the #FujiNet firmware, to the URL in the devicespec.

 

-Thom

Edited February 4, 2021 by tschak909

[+DjayBee]

And as the to-be-developed database archives by hash instead of filename, nothing which is different will be overwritten; and if it's the same, nothing will be overwritten because it's already there (except maybe for some added metadata about "your" upload).

 

Now we must only find somebody to code it...

[tschak909]

17 minutes ago, DjayBee said:

And as the to-be-developed database archives by hash instead of filename, nothing which is different will be overwritten; and if it's the same, nothing will be overwritten because it's already there (except maybe for some added metadata about "your" upload).

 

Now we must only find somebody to code it...

Yup, I know exactly WHAT to do, all my cycles are chewed up in working on N:

 

One of my past lives was working on WinAMP Cloud, for....WinAMP, which is/was owned by AOL, and we had multiple hash types that were used to keep track of the file. An sha1 of the data, an sha1 of the title (after normalized removing all white space and special characters), and a sha1 hash of the metadata, a difference in any of these would cause different behaviors as to how the file was catalogued. 

 

-Thom

[Atari8guy]

I always thought it'd be a good project to do something like aminet for the Atari.  If we could have that kind of web front end for all the PD stuff (basic and other) out there, with an easy way to upload...I'd help.  I've said many times I can't code, but that's not entirely accurate.  My coding skills are just old, think Pascal, but more recently (but still a while ago) Java, C++, and then database stuff - SQL mostly (I ran my own dating site for a while, used an open source content management system but lots of customization to the code and the underlying database tables)..... of course I have two kids under 5 so hitting deadlines is an issue.

[tschak909]

Another example, most of Dynacomp's catalog was written in BASIC (and ironically mostly by one guy, Jerry White), and has been lost to the winds of time, I am STILL looking for a copy of Chompelo.

 

-Thom

 

[cx2k]

I'm currently going through a bunch of PD & User Group disks and will send it all to Atarimania when done and sorted.

 

John

 

[tschak909]

1 minute ago, cx2k said:

I'm currently going through a bunch of PD & User Group disks and will send it all to Atarimania when done and sorted.

 

John

 

You are doing noble work, sir.  Thank you.

-Thom