Hi folks... Developer News 20/03/97 Life, the Universe and Moving House ----------------------------------- As some of you are already aware, the house move went rather well and was remarkably painless; although the new place still bears a resemblance to "Cardboard City with a roof on" in some rooms, but it's getting more and more livable-in each week. For those of you who are interested, especially if you won't be able to make it to one of the housewarmings (which look like they will take place at the end of April or start of May; my original estimates were pretty good), I went mad with a Casio QV-10A last weekend; the results can be seen on http://www.acorn.co.uk/~dwalker/house/ :-) The two weeks holiday I took to move were followed by another unscheduled week off owing to a family hiatus, hence Developer Support, NetStation stuff and all the other bits and pieces I do are currently very much up in the air; I'll be doing my best to get things back under control over the course of this next week, and getting up to speed with technology developments and release timescale revisions I've missed through not being here. Please bear with me! Resubscriptions and Other Services ---------------------------------- A number of developers have asked about renewing their Developer subscription for 1997. I know that the "old" Acorn Developer Support system required new subscriptions at the start of each calendar year, however as I consider that to be a little bit of a rip-off (especially for developers who signed up during the latter half of the year) annual ART Developer Support subscriptions run from the day of an individual developer's sign-up until 365 (or 366 as the case may be) days later. I'll be sorting out individual reminders as resubscription dates approach; don't worry about service suddenly being cut off without notice. In response to issues of information propagation (a number of you were unhappy about the Clan receiving news before you did; I agree entirely that Developers should receive news first, but regrettably this isn't always possible as not all the information gets to me in time or in electronic form...), I've had you all signed up for Clan subscriptions free of charge. I know this isn't the most elegant solution to the problem, but at least you're now guaranteed to get the information at the same time as other members. We're starting a emailed news digest up internally, so I'll see what can be done about propagating chunks of this to you. Thanks... --------- ...to all the hardware developers who returned completed copies of the expansion bus signal usage survey from Developer News 13/02/97; as a result of the feedback, it's looking like Risc PC 2 will be retaining the existing Expansion Bus support with the exception of one slow DMA mode which nobody appears to use (and bits of it may be optionally configurable to run a little faster than the current system). Developer-releasable papers on Galileo are in preparation, so I'll make these available to you as and when I get hold of them; information on Risc PC 2 should also start filtering out within the next couple of months subject to clearance. The only big hint I can drop at the moment is that, thanks to a combination of wishlist feedback and the fact that we were thinking about doing it anyway, expansion card developers might also like to start looking at the specs for 33MHz PCI... New ROMPatches -------------- A revised version of the RISC OS 3.7 ROMpatches app has been made publicly available as ftp://ftp.acorn.co.uk/pub/riscos/patches/riscos360+370.arc ; as the filename suggests, the patch set has been made OS-sensitive so that it may be installed on RISC OS 3.6 systems to fix problems (mainly in printing) which are common to both RISC OS 3.60 and 3.70. Full details of the individual fixes are supplied in documentation inside the archive. New Internet Module ------------------- The final release version of Internet 4.xx (Internet 4.10, as it happens) has now been uploaded to our public ftp site; this is the version which network card manufacturers should distribute on their cards, and indeed is the version you *must* use - we will no longer support distribution of new cards with previous versions of Internet 4.xx (other than existing stocks). The distribution is found in the usual place; ftp://ftp.acorn.co.uk/pub/riscos/releases/networking/DCI4/ . The ftp://ftp.acorn.co.uk/pub/riscos/releases/networking/DCI4/internet.arc and ftp://ftp.acorn.co.uk/pub/riscos/releases/networking/DCI4/system.arc files are the ones which have been changed to support this new release. NetStation ---------- After assorted problems and delays, I finally got my NetStation the day before yesterday! Unfortunately I haven't managed to get it booting yet (pcnfsd doesn't appear to be working as everything stops with RPC timeouts although the bootp phase works fine). However: I now have a working slightly stripped-down version of the server-side bootstrap sequence which can definitely be distributed among developers for experimental purposes. I'm compelled to state explicitly that this distribution must IN NO WAY be used for commercial gain (use it to boot your own NetStations on your own server internally for testing and developing apps by all means, but don't eg sell it, use it to set yourself up as a NetStation-serving ISP or otherwise let it propagate outside your company) - if you wish to use a server-side distribution in a commercial context, talk to me as I have the forms necessary to sign up to the relevant developer programme. The server is, as before, available as http://www.art.acorn.co.uk/SALES/DEVELOPERS/resource/reference/nc/bootstrap.tar.Z . The release note is distributed separately as http://www.art.acorn.co.uk/SALES/DEVELOPERS/resource/reference/nc/relnote.txt Documentation will follow once I've got my NetStation working and have hacked it around and written the docs. Something at least (if only details of what not to do when configuring a server!) should emerge by the middle of next week. StrongHelp files for Toolbox and C Rel 5 ---------------------------------------- Neil does it again... The StrongHelp files detailing to Toolbox API and the libraries for C Release 5 are now complete and uploaded to the Developer site; you can find them as http://www.art.acorn.co.uk/SALES/DEVELOPERS/resource/devtools/ctoolboxhelp.arc and http://www.art.acorn.co.uk/SALES/DEVELOPERS/resource/devtools/ctoolboxhelp.arc . ctoolboxhelp covers more ground than the paper manuals (including things only documented in the header files...) and c5help documents CLib5, both the ANSI and RiscOS specific bits such as kernel.h. Unless you are using RiscOSLib, c5help will replace Gareth Boden's 'C' manual. Phew... if at least some of this lot doesn't keep you amused, it's time for me to worry. Anyway, time to get back to bashing my head against pcnfsd... Cheers, Dave