[Coco] pf for epson for drivewire

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 01 April 2013 10:38:33 Willard Goosey did opine:

> On Sun, Mar 31, 2013 at 10:38:46PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > pf can do some amazing work if you take the time to add the dot
> > markups in your prose.
> 
> By the time I found pf, I'd moved my heavy document production to
> ms-dos and UNIX.  My main interest is producing human-readable
> versions of docs distributed in pf form.
> 
> Ever since I set up the Drivewire Epson emulator I've been setting all
> my OS-9 programs to use it.  Most of the text formatters / word
> processors came with an Epson config file. Now that I have pf
> co-operating all that's left, I believe is, is tsfmt. ;-)
> 
> > Which bru man page? Version 1.2's docs may have some pf style markups
> > in them, but I haven't looked at that in most of 2 decades.
> 
> 1.1 and 1.2 docs.

Those would have been from me. BRU however, despite its namesake, wasn't 
one of my better efforts, The current author of the *nix cups proigram, 
Mike Sweet, aka DodgeColt back in his delphi days, wrote that while he was 
still in school.

It needed to (it and rzsz) be converted to operating on a buffer full of 
data at a time for crc calcs, and to be able to run those calcs fast enough 
to deal with a std disk interleave of 3.  But when making the backups, the 
best recording time of about 10 minutes a floppy was when the floppy was 
formatted with an interleave of 8.  That I could almost tolerate, BUT, 
regardless of the floppy interleave, the recovery was so slow that a 765K 
(84 track formatted) floppy, was about 32 minutes of time per floppy disk 
fed to the recovery.  So a recovery for me was 3 very long days of running 
in here to see if it was ready for yet another floppy since a backup of the 
130 meg maxtor took about 90 of those 765k disks.  Tandon 10-4 drives at 
the time.  Today, working from one 1Gb disk to a 2nd one wouldn't need all 
that baby sitting, but would still be very time consuming.  Its easier to 
format the 2nd one and dsave the first one to it, which once its been 
started, doesn't need all that baby sitting. Or just have dsave overwrite 
the targets.

If someone cares, BRU would be suitable for conversion of the crc 
calculations being done over a buffer or fraction thereof, by transplanting 
the table lookup method I used in the last couple releases of rzsz into it, 
as that was, even on the character by character architecture of rzsz, 
responsible for about a 200 cps speed up in that utility, from 430 to 640 
cps.  Doing that in one call over a buffer full at a time would probably 
have gained another 2 to 3 hundred cps, maybe enough to keep up with a 9600 
baud serial port connection.

Changing the underlying architecture from character based to 256 byte 
buffer based would likely make another 2x speed improvement to rzsz.  But 
that would be a whole lot of work, probably best done as a switchable into 
use from a command line option subroutine.  But I never managed to find a 
round tuit big enough to get started.

To get serial speeds out of the way, it seems that using bru over drivewire 
might take a lot of the pain out of backups.  I might even play with that 
while I am waiting for some end mills I need.  No promises though, because 
I have more data than can be contained in a drivewire virtual file (I 
think).

I just checked and Aaron, whats the biggest file I can us as a drivewire 
disk?  The one I have been using as a scratchpad is now over 10 megs.

I usually have dsave make a shell file so I can tweak if needed, then feed 
that back to a shell.  I should do that again too since I've the reboot 
utility since, bootlink, which can, after loading the default boottrack 
from your hard drive, switch to any other HDB-DOS virtual disk to complete 
the loading of os9boot from any valid, bootable vdisk.

It checks to make sure the targeted vdisk is actually boot able before 
altering the links, so hopefully it is difficult to shoot oneself in the 
foot using it.  :)

> > I used it (pf) for several years after I wrote it as the Sears/Epson
> > printer I had at the time was a relabeled oki sr5000.
> 
> Yes, I was quite happy when I actually looked through the sr5000
> driver definition and it was epson.
> 
> Willard

As Yoda would have said, Serendipity I think they call that.  :)

Cheers, Gene
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