[Coco] Another MShell update and bug fix

[Bill Pierce]

Steven, yes I have, but I don't think Aaron has time anymore for doing anything to DW4 for a while as he has been busy with his work & life (no updates in over a year). He's stated as much here on the list and has welcomed anyone interested to work on it. It IS open source and always has been.
If I knew anything about Java programming, I would look into it, but I know about as much Java as I know Japanese :-)

The problem is in a cmd Aaron wrote specifically to solve a problem I was having back when I was writing "DW4Man". It is a machine level cmd, "xdir", that returns a series of packets when you request a dir listing from the PC server. 1 packet per filename. The cmd works well in windows, but Linux & Mac are sending something unexpected and it screws up the cmd's data return. This cmd was implemented as an alternative to a similar cmd that returned a text string instead binary formatted... (Exmpl: 1 or 0 as opposed to "TRUE" or "FALSE"). The cmd was a quick fix and we never got into testing it thoroughly at the time and it was not discovered that it failed on Linux and Mac until I was working on MShell a year or so later. The problem is that this packet returns 12 bytes of info, then a filename and on Linux and Mac, certain files (not all) return 14 or 16 bytes then the filename. I have no idea what the extra bytes are or how to determine when it's actually sending extra bytes or the normal count. I have a feeling it has something to do with permissions on hidden or system files when the info is requested from the server as the extra bytes seem to come right after the byte flagging the "read only" attribute of the file.

At first I thought it was my dw4 cmd parser in my software. But I found I got the same results when using the cmd on the console in dw4 itself without a Coco or emulator connection, so it is definately a dw4 problem.

Aaron was working on a complete rewrite of DW4 when he got too busy for Coco stuff. I saw some of the previews and a list of objectives and it was good stuff. I just wish he could find the time to complete it, or that someone would jump in and give him a hand. From what I saw, the new implementation would make programming DW4 a breeze, but alas.... we may never see it come to life.

 

 


Bill Pierce
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-----Original Message-----
From: Steven Hirsch <snhirsch at gmail.com>
To: Bill Pierce via Coco <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Thu, Oct 29, 2015 8:15 am
Subject: Re: [Coco] Another MShell update and bug fix


On Wed, 28 Oct 2015, Bill Pierce via Coco wrote:

> As a reminder, MShell's DW4
Server PC reads, writes, and dirlist DO NOT 
> WORK on a Linux or Mac DW4
Server. This is due to something different 
> being sent by the server on the
file list cmd. It works flawlessly on a 
> Windows DW4 server.

Have you let
Aaron know about the issue?


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