From joseph.norton at gmail.com Fri Nov 5 11:01:18 2021 From: joseph.norton at gmail.com (joseph.norton at gmail.com) Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2021 11:01:18 -0400 Subject: [Blindapple] My latest adventure with ProLine BBS Message-ID: <006001d7d255$fd803550$f8809ff0$@gmail.com> Hi listers: While this isn't the old talking Apple exactly, I figure some of you might be interested in this. Well, I've been having more fun with the ProLine BBS software, after I found a copy of the Y2K patch, thanks to Kelvin Sherlock, who still maintains ProKegs, a telnetable ProLine BBS running on a modified copy of Kegs. You may remember my earlier attempts, which were mostly successful. There was one fiddling little thing that was still bothering me. Currently, I could run the software with AppleWin, emulating the Apple //e, in combination with a couple other programs that made the telnet possible. However, no matter what I did, even with the addition of the Y2K patches from Eric A. Seiden, ProLine would show the wrong day of the week. On Monday, it said Tue, though the actual numeric date was correct, for Tuesday, it printed Wed, an so forth. On Sunday, no day was printed at all. If I ran it under MAME, (impractical since I can't find any way for MAME to do serial communications), which had a choice of the ThunderClock or the Applied Engineering TimeMaster, it did get things right. If I ran it under GSPlus, it flew, since it was running on a Apple iigs emulation, but, the TCP code, built into GSPlus was buggy and didn't fully interact with the serial port, and, it would become unresponsive after a short time. So, I was back to AppleWin, but, that day thing bothered me. It turns out that AppleWin emulates the NoSlot Clock, which is a little piece of hardware that installs in a socket under one of the ROMs on the Apple II's motherboard. ProDOS didn't natively recognize it, so you needed a program called "NS.CLOCK.SYSTEM" to chain to your next ProDos program to use iit. But, the weird thing is that the NoSlot Clock used a slightly different convention for the day of week function. ProLine used the method employed by the 2 other clocks mentioned, as well as the method used by the IIgs to store the day of week. So, it would always be one day off. So, I Emailed Mr. Sherlock of ProKegs, and he was kind enough to look at the source code of AppleWin, and disassemble the ProLine time module and locate the place where the day of week was handled. All I had to do was use a binary/hex editor and change the strings indicating the day of week, and it fixed the problem. So, I'm back in business with AppleWin now, and the day of the week is being reported correctly, and all seems to work properly. I lucked out, searching for an accessible editor, but, I had to use a Windows program called "FRHED", but, thanks to CiderPress, I could extract the file, work on it, and re-import it back into the disk image. So, all's well that ends well, or has it? Now, if I can put it up on telnet again, I might just put it up and let anyone who wants to to play with it. I got a more complete set of games, including a trivia game, today in history, 3 text adventures, and a port of what I am almost sure is Eliza, named Freud. All of that was on the Y2K patch disk in a shrinkit archive. Cheers! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From joseph.norton at gmail.com Fri Nov 5 21:59:06 2021 From: joseph.norton at gmail.com (joseph.norton at gmail.com) Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2021 21:59:06 -0400 Subject: [Blindapple] Test disk for TexTalker GS 1.4 Message-ID: <00f301d7d2b1$e1ee63a0$a5cb2ae0$@gmail.com> Hi listers: I decided to play around with the textalker update disk in the dropbox folder. I copied the files talk, talk.0 and talk.init into the util directory of the textalker GS 1.0 disk and it seems to boot up. I did have to do a couple things differently, which I will explain. Read this before you go out and grab this disk. First, this version of TTGS wants you to boot using the device echoii, not echoiiplus. So, a typical command line for booting the disk might be something like this: Mame apple2gs -sl3 echoii -flop3 tt14test.po If all goes well, you should hear "Textalker installed" and a warning about the ramdisk. I included the conp command on the disk, which you can use to correct this. At the prompt, issue the command: Conp -rs8 Which will set up a ramdisk so TTGS will be copied over there. After you issue the command, exit the emulator and restart it with the same command line. This time, TTGS will get copied over to the ramdisk. Here's the dropbox link to my test disk: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6jfigxmk3pf0mfz/tt14test.po?dl=1 This is an 800K image. Cheers. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: