Finding a ROM module
Chris Hall (132) 3554 posts |
It would be really useful if someone could do a list of the ROMmodules with a link to where the source can be found in CVS – for example: as you need to guess the top level and look and it takes time… I may even do it myself but I’ll wait for a bit in case (i) it already exists or (ii) there’s an easy way to do it already. |
Sprow (202) 1158 posts |
As you can imagine, the build system needs to know that too so it knows where to find the source code it’s about to compile. So it uses a master ModuleDB to locate stuff. |
Chris Hall (132) 3554 posts |
Many thanks. |
Rick Murray (539) 13840 posts |
There’s some interesting looking “closed” things listed there. |
Steve Revill (20) 1361 posts |
I just counted – there’s around 450 MiB of stuff in the public CVS repo. In the closed tree, there’s still around 1000 MiB of stuff. Much of this is STB-specific and will never (in the foreseeable future) be made public. |
David Feugey (2125) 2709 posts |
Java? :) |
Rick Murray (539) 13840 posts |
@ David – if that’s the Java that was given away to Foundation members, it is going to be so out of date as to be near useless other than as a reading exercise. Personally, I’d enjoy taking a gander at the software PCEm. I remember it wasn’t so bad on an A5000. Imagine it on a Pi. ;-) @ Steve – don’t suppose there’s a Japanese IME? Various help files hint at it, but… |
Chris Hall (132) 3554 posts |
ROM Modules: (Begs the question why a few modules have different names like BASIC and BASIC105 – these all shown with []’s below): 1.UtilityModule (MOS Utilities 5.21 (18 Oct 2014)) |
Rick Murray (539) 13840 posts |
Were some of them softloaded (supplied as disc modules)? I seem to remember DragAnObj and UnSqzAIF from my RISC OS 3.10 days, so perhaps the names are derived from 10-character-safe filenames? |
David Feugey (2125) 2709 posts |
For the same reason: because some software can work on it. But with the same limits: it’s out of date :) For Java, there is some Corel software, a very good editor, and a few other things. |
Steve Pampling (1551) 8170 posts |
For any unmaintained software you can reliably state that is a situation that is unlikely to change while the source remains closed. Open it and interested people will play. |
Rick Murray (539) 13840 posts |
Open it, and your legacy can live on, perhaps long after you have lost interest or drawn a line under it. Would you like to be remembered as something that was important back in the eighties or nineties, or would you rather all the time and effort you spent developing the original program not be forgotten at the back of some dusty drawer in the attic of your mind? When you feel that a program has gone as far as you plan to take it….the story does not need to end there. Perhaps the best example I could offer is the reason you’re even here at all. |
Chris Johnson (125) 825 posts |
Isn’t one the normal Basic, and the other the floating point version? |
Chris Hall (132) 3554 posts |
No. The same module is named differently depending whether you look at *HELP MODULES (BBC BASIC V), *ROMMODULES or *MODULES (BASIC) or in ModuleDB (BASIC105). This is also true for a few others but mostly the *HELP MODULES just has an extra space or excalamtion mark and the *MODULES matches the ModuleDB. |
Steve Revill (20) 1361 posts |
The component names in the module DB are arbitrary – they do not always match either the actual component name (e.g. module title) or its name on disc, if any (e.g. BASIC64), nor do they always match the leafname of the component’s source code directory (because there are a couple called ‘Manager’, for example). That’s just the way things are. |
Steve Drain (222) 1620 posts |
I am intrigued by that “BASIC 105”. What does 105 stand for? The naming of various flavours of BASIC has never been clear, but I cannot fit that in. If it is the interpreter version, then that also applies to BASIC VI, as documented in the manual. You can also see this because the ID word at R14-4 from CALL is &BA51C005 for both. Actually, it feels to me that this might have been intended to incicate V, and BASIC VI should have been &BA51C006, but that is not what it is. If it is the BASIC version, then that is only designated by V or VI, not a decimal. If it is the module version, then it is incorrect; that was the original stable version with RO2. Here the confusion may arise, because the module version and interpreter version were both 1.05. In truth, I am not sure why there is an interpreter version, but the step from 1.04 to 1.05 may have been significant and warranted its own mention. There has, perhaps, not been a similar change since. In summary, as far as I can make sense of it, BASIC V and BASIC VI are the names for the 5-byte float and 8-byte float Basics; *Basic and *Basic64 are the commands to invoke them; they both use interpreter version 1.05; the modules have versions, now 1.50+, which usually advance in parallel. |
Jeffrey Lee (213) 6048 posts |
My theory is that the RO2 version of BASIC was developed by a programmer working in isolation from most of the rest of the team/source tree (remember that this would have probably been in the dark days before Acorn had a proper version control system). Then near the end of the RO2 development cycle the code would have been merged back into the main source repository. But for some reason or another Acorn needed to maintain support both Arthur and RO2 versions of BASIC (maybe the build system relied on it, or maybe so they could release bugfixes back to existing users, or maybe for testing), so rather than overwrite the existing version they merged the two versions together (using switches in the source code to control which version got built) and added a new entry to ModuleDB to allow builds to select between using either the Arthur or RO2 versions. |
Steve Drain (222) 1620 posts |
I am certain that the one person development team is right. I did have some exchanges with SW when developing my BASIC StrongHelp manual, and that included a draft version of the ‘History’ part of the Reference Manual. I got the distinct impression that the manual itself was not in her hands. So, the ‘105’ goes back that far, and as Steve R says “That’s just the way things are”. ;-) |