A timely tale... Yesterday morning got an email from Rob that read: "I tried to phone but either you were spending some family time, or crashed". It was neither. I was running about the roads begging juggernauts to run me over. Why? I had just deleted 4 days worth of work and then reformatted the drive. True! Unbelievable I hear you say, but no, I did it. And what was worse it was intricate work, making the final tweaks to Fant 5.10. Anyway, luckily I must have a photographic memory as I knew almost every line of every bug fix and rebuilding what I had done took about eight hours. What made it worse was I backed up the whole wrong disk to CD before the reformat - so I didn't make just one mistake, but two on the trot! Just a sobering little story in this time of switching to HFS+ and possible mass formatting. Back up and CHECK you have backed up the RIGHT drive before reformatting (Yeah, I know "TOSSER!"). Testing, testing. Fant510. OK, you'll like this. Hopefully, by the time you read this, in the "For the Brave" area you'll find lots of new stuff. Anvil 2, Fant 510 and LXT. The good news is all this stuff is fat, so you'd expect it to be faster than V5.00. Well it is, with Fant 510 being especially faster than V5 - up to, and get this, 8 times the speed of Fant 5 on big projects. It's all been done with LXT (no, we don't use anybody elses stuff) and I'd bet anybody that a half decent coder could beat any native C compiler in about the same time with regards to the speed of the native code using LXT. For Fant 5 to rebuild the native version of iteslf (through LXT) was taking over 1500 seconds (Apple's EMU). Fant 5.1 does is it 223 seconds. Of course the 68K version rebuilds in about 30 and even on small projects like our demo, we rebuild the native code in five times the speed over Fant 5. Anyway, you'll find Anvil faster too - it chroma codes at four times the speed of V1, or twice as fast if you were using speedemulator with Anvil 1. We've released this stuff now, rather than when all the new features are in simply because it will improve your productivity. In return we ask you report bugs and feature requests. LXT is something you should definitely take a look at. Even if you hate 68K code, you'll find the OS interface macros make your life much easier. The same interface for both 68K and PPC - plonk your parameters in registers and call the macro. Because these macro's use a modified Xcall you can also push and pop onto the stack with impunity. These macros (same 250 of them so far) are tried and tested, they remove the possibility of error in your code. If you miss or forget a parameter, you'll be told. If you find a macro for a call you want is not included, just add it - the macros are simple and self explanatory as to what you need to do. We would also ask you send a copy to us so we can maintain and update the collection. If you need to convert 68k to PPC, you will find LXT makes your life a lot simpler. It directly handles translating the code, data and data space to a PPC executable. You will probably need to make some minor source changes, but it comes with a pretty useful manual (LSA0500), and of course you can always drop us an email and we'll sort you out. LXT NEEDS Fant 5.10 and won't work with V5.00. LXT is also a pretty nice language to write in from scratch if you want a lot of control over the machine and a fast fat app. According to how well Rhapsody is accepted, we do envisage auto translation of LXT projects to Rhapsody. A86 is also a possibility, but it's not a high priority on our hit list. If you deperately need to convert 68K to A86, pay us and we'll produce an LXT translator and OS I/F to do it. Why hand translate and introduce all those bugs? (BTW, if the software isn't there yet its because: Currently most of the phone lines around the Towers are covered in icicles. Every time one falls off, it makes this pinging sound that crashes all the Wintel boxes down at the ISP!) StuChat My, but it's been a long time :-) But I'm back! Bigger,bolder and upgraded. Yes, it's Stu 8.1! A quick word about Fantasm 5.1 - it's a work in progress, this is why it creates a new prefs folder (lightsoft test), just in case it trashes Fant 5's prefs, so treat with caution. We've done internal testing, and a few other people have had it for a few days, so we believe it to be reasonably solid. You'll need to enter your license number into Anvil2, and 9999999 won't work. Now here's a sad tale for you. Last night I was speaking to Rob on the phone. I said it would be cool if a project could have some persistant variables associated with it. Rob, as quick as a flash of lightening, immediately said "K&R page 233 - Predefined names". Is that sad or what? I mean, I live coding right? But that response was just too fast. It's frightening. There wasn't a second delay (and it's a true story folks, I'm not making this up). Poor Claire. (K&R is the C book, it's really called "The C programming Language" but nobody calls it that. It's called "K&R" because the people that wrote it (the book and the language) are called Kernighan and Ritchie. Or Bry and Den to their mates, but "B&D" just wouldn't work). The number of the wot? Would you release software with a build number of 666? Thought not. We were incredibly tempted to get a witty comment out of Anvil 2 if the build number clicked over to this, but then thought.... BSS Picked this up from the comp.compiler newsgroup - it's something thats been bothering me for a long time: [I've heard a variety of explanations but here's the one I belive: Back in the 1950s, the IBM 704 and its descendants up through the 7094 had an odd addressing scheme. Although most arithmetic was sign-magnitude, the index registers were two's complement and the contents of the index register was subtracted rather than added to the base address in an instruction to get the effective address. Hence a lot of programs, including everything written in Fortran, stored their arrays backward. The FAP assembler had two pseudo-ops to reserve storage, BSS for Block Started by Symbol and BES for Block Ended by Symbol. The backward addressing has long since disappeared but BSS lives on. This explanation is credited to Ritchie in the Unix FAQ that's floating around the net. Alternative explanations welcome, but if they don't predate 1960 and have documentation, they're not persuasive. -John] Also big thanks to Kevin MacDonald who sent me this: [as for the meaning of 'bss', it has meaning to the PDP/11 assembler, which was the machine that ushered Unix into the mainstream in the early 1970s. 'text', 'data' and 'bss' have become popular terms because unix uses them, unix uses 'C' and many programmers--on many non-unix platforms--use 'C'.] Apple What would a StuChat be with some reference to the Mothership :-) So (this is the weekend just gone), there we were sat in this nice little pub at the top (literally!) of Lincoln. Rob (and Claire) were try to educate moi about "Art". Now my opinion of art is that I really can't see the point of it - I mean, where's the creativity? More often than not, what you see is just a copy - best left to a Xerox or scanner IMNSHO. Rob and Claire don't see it that way. Anyway, there we were drinking a nice cuppa in this pub. Rob was going on about Pre Roulette or something similar, and I was thinking "How the hell did Apple's market share jump 47% in Europe last year?" According to some figures I read on t'NET sometime last week (might've been by IDC or some similar "produce nothing but boy are we important company", bit like Microsoft really<G> (Can I say that?, Yeah 'course I can. Chill out Bill.)) Apple's market share did just that. Now that's one big jump. Then I looked at our orders for the last month, and there are an awful lot of European ones. This is good from our point of view - cheaper postage and no silly green stickers to fill out. You can get SO sick of filling those out - I mean, do they really expect you to be honest so the poor customer can get done for a load of sales tax? Nah, course not. Anyway, how did Apple's share jump so much? Has Europe suddenly become pro Apple? Dunno. Maybe a lot of it has to do with these new 603 boxes (oops, sorry, I mean GEE THREE). Granted they are fast, but it's not down to the processor so much as the decent bus speed and cache. Anyway, maybe the [market share] figures have been "diddled"? Maybe it's true. Dunno. [BIG FANFARE] Here's today's tip for Steve: Get 3D hardware on the motherboard as standard. License the Glide to Rave convertor from whoever it is (IXMicro?) or write your own (faster!) one and make that a standard part of the OS. Then bung a load of game developers some dosh (we think you may be doing this already - Tempest 2000?) and get them games over here! Really, until cheapo 3d hardware is a standard "Macism" we ain't going to get anywhere near Tomb Raider or the size of the PeeCee game market no matter how fast the processor. Oh, and give us decent edge matching in that will you? And don't think expensive - think cheap - any old 64 bit 3d chip will do, just as long as it'll do rave, glide and openGL. Bung it on new motherboards and also produce a cheapo PCI (and Nubus) card and flog it to us faithful. Then, finally, if you bundle Quake, and do a whole G3 Mac avec el 3D HW for a grand, you will be made a Saint most pronto. Simple. What's that? TriMedia? Well we've been listening to that for 2 years now. Haven't seen it though. My Mac is less than 2 years old (and it had better run Rhap right?) and I don't see any Trimedia chip in it? Just recently I spent close to 200Ukp on a graphics card and Trimedia or anything even remotely Dutch was not an option. Oh, and beeteedoubleyew, "We love you Steve!!!!!" And no, we don't want your y-fronts, honest. No, really, that's fine. Gotta Love it! (Or idiot of the week award) http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/content/pcmo/0120/272453.html Wrap Well there you go. Hope you found that fun and I didn't annoy anybody. If I did you can always switch channels or just press the "off" button. Just a short note. After this was written it was decided that we would need to take off line all test executables and make them available via email only. Why? The usual sad tale of a cracked demo license. Sorry guys'n'gals, but now we need you to email us your licence number and we'll email the latest goodies back to you.
Till the next time,
Code on!
Late breaking news: It's official. A brain scan (carried out by "Excellent Cat" Fluff) on Patch revealed a complete vacuum (so she says). There is nothing there. We'll move him to packaging.
Next!