19 ноября 2018

Новости

                              News
                         by Alone Coder

This issue was mostly formed by Maksagor, Cyberdaemon, and
Hippiman - let me explain why. 

In September, Nikolay Grivin came to my job, and I started to
teach him assembler (is appeared that they don't teach it in the
university). I chose the Z80 assembler, as we know about its
many utilities, emulators, and debugging tools. During the
classes, we made a lot of different programs - tetris, snake,
battle city, raytrace (assembly version of the known Basic 
example, it even fits in 1K and 300 seconds), and among others I
revived the projects of a multitasking OS NedoOS and a gfx
editor Scratch for colour-per pixel mode. This takes most of my
time, the coding goes well, so I don't want to stop here.

NedoOS provides user programs with CP/M -like environment plus 
the possibility to order and switch memory banks in three memory
windows. It supports file systems FAT12/16/32 (via FatFS -
thanks to DimkaM ) at IDE and SD card (thanks to Savelij13 ),
and also TR-DOS. It uses memory by ATM2(+) and ATMЗ standards.

NedoOS, Scratch, as well as utilities cmd.com and Nedovigator, 
complete with the sources, are periodically mailed to interested
people (contact me), but I don't make the full release yet,
because the system changes rapidly. I plan to add NedoLang and
write a text editor, to make it possible to work inside the
system.

When I made Scratch, I spotted a bug in 8col editor and made
the fixed version 0.14.

I was able to visit NedoPC party at the бth of October ( Lord
Vader persuaded me), where I showed Listh language glued to the 
3D engine from Info Guide #12. Lord Vader easily broke it with
recursion and defined a postfix plus :)
I also showed there Scratch for the first time. When I did, new
versions of Unreal Speccy appeared inoperable at KOE's computer,
only those compiled in MSVCб work.

Maksagor wrote an ANSI viewer for OS TASiS (press "5" ). 

Fyrex slowly fixes Unreal Speccy Portable for ATM memory. 
For that, I quickly made a ROM image with ports test.

SAM Style added DDp's palette support in Xpeccy emulator. 
Waiting for Unreal Speccy :)

Arwald hasn't invited new students for 2D animation this year. 
He is writing some game with old ones, and he can't find the
notebook with Rusted Souls script.

Cyberdaemon and Hippiman sent their ideas for playability in new 
Speccy games (press "3" ).

Hippiman himself updated the scripting system in his DizzyAgeZX 
engine, so full-value subroutines can be written with this
script - for example, password entry.

^mOOh^ found new old Soviet software for Speccy. I'm digging 
through it :)

Together with John Silver we study Russian style in music. We
wrote two trackes for "Š®­ñª-ƒ®à¡ã­®ª" game currently being made
by Flash_ZX, then we stuck. John proposes a new idea for music
editor - displaying notes as horizontal bars with variable width
and colour, grouped recursively. Maybe he will have time to
visit me at the first Sasha's birthday ( Dasha is now 3 years -
time goes so fast!).

Graf Grey/OHG made the first player for NeoGS supporting 8 
channels - Neo8 Player, it also supports IDE HDD and SD card.

Utz is updating MDAL format (with fully abstract structure now) 
and maked the music editor Bintracker. By the time, he sent
me an ancient Soviet article about computer music:

A friend of mine found an interesting thing. A certain Rudolf 
Zaripov doing algorithmic compositions on URAL-2 in 1959/1960. 
http://www.mathnet.ru/php/getFT.phtml?jrnid=dan&paperid=23732 
&what=fullt&option_lang=rus 
Not exactly what I'm looking for (which is music actually played 
on mainframes), but still interesting. Seems the guy also 
continued this work later on BESM-6. There is something I could 
use your help though. On page 4 of his paper there is what 
appears to be some sort of flow chart of the program he used. 
Have you ever seen this syntax before, and/or could you point me 
to an explanation on how to read this schema? 

Can anybody decipher the algorithm on page 4?

So, I think, there is a lot to write in the next Info Guide :)

Finally, at 2бth of October, a son was born to Lord Vader and
Ansy, named Timofey.