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- 4/21/86
- TO: David Jewett, III
- Harry Kaemmerer
- PPIP users
-
- FROM: Bruce Morgen
- North American One-Eighty Group
- P.O. Box 2781
- Warminster, PA 18974
-
- Subject: PPIP12
-
- PIP12 came about because of the extreme usefulness and competence of
- PPIP11, which led me to examine the source code. Following the
- philosophy of using defined bytes near the beginning of the program
- to control various characteristics via simple patching rather than
- reassembly (the most common 8080 assemblers, ASM and MAC, are pretty
- slow by today's standards), one can change the entire command line
- syntax of PPIP11 by altering a single byte. In CP/M mode, PPIP11
- follows the traditional DRI syntax used in PIP 1.5 and followed by
- such popular programs as Dave Rand's USQ120 and the ZCPR3 MCOPY
- utility, while in MS-DOS mode PPIP11 emulates the MS-DOS COPY
- command, like Jim Lopushinky's NSQ111 and Sigi Kluger's USQZ13.
-
- Since the routine for `flipping' the syntax was already there, it
- occured to me that BOTH styles could be easily supported by the
- simple expedient of scanning the command line tail for `=', which all
- of the known CP/M-style utilties use as a delimiter between filenames
- - all the programs that follow the more `natural' (unless you are as
- brain-trained in CP/M conventions as I am) MS-DOS approach use only
- ASCII spaces as delimiters.
-
- By giving up the use of spaces and commas in CP/M mode (if anyone
- actually does that, stick with PPIP11), I made PPIP12 fully
- automatic. Use it like PIP or USQ: it works. Use it like COPY or
- SQ: it STILL works. The neat single file form (B11>ppip
- a7:myfile.txt) works exactly as before.
-
- I also added two somewhat minor (unless they apply to your system
- and/or work style) features. I inserted a call to to BDOS function
- 48, which is unsupported in CP/M 2.2 and harmless in other 8-bit DRI
- systems. This addition detects the presence of Echelon's ZRDOS,
- which does not require a disk reset for a safe disk write, and skips
- the ensuing call to BDOS 13 if ZRDOS is resident. This is a
- substantial speed-up for ZRDOS users and has no effect on the
- operation of the program under vanilla BDOS. I also added a couple
- of lines of code to support a ZCPR3-style help request (PPIP //).
-
- Enjoy!
-
-