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Software Vault: The Diamond Collection
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The Diamond Collection (Software Vault)(Digital Impact).ISO
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WANTED.TXT
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1995-01-14
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88 lines
WANTED: HARDWARE & SYSTEM DOCS
DEAD OR ALIVE (better if internet-reachable)
I don't have many $ (well, no dollar$ and very few Italian Lira$)
sooner or later i will buy a CD-ROM to get access to those
disks packed with informations for devenlopers
but until then i will have to scan the internet for docs.
I know there are lots of CD-ROMs with all the info i want, but, heck!
386P 2.00 Most wanted info needed to provide you a better 386P+XGE toolkit
21 August 1994
GENERAL MIDI
I've gathered some info from x2ftp.oulu.fi about midi and gen. midi
but it is not enough, i want to be 100% compatible before the release
a MIDI DRIVER (capable to "simulate" a general midi interface
above a plain XSD driver, or to play midi files using the
Adlib ADSR synthesis , or hooking to a general midi card)
VL-BUS,MCA,EISA & PCI Direct Memory Access
I really want to go for overkill! The current VDMA module
is intended to support (currently) only ISA BUS DMA
So i don't know how it may work with MicroChannel (MCA)
and i know it can't take advantage of the extra
capabilities of EISA, VL-BUS or PCI.
If you have dettailed info about bus identification,setup
and DMA on these systems PLEASE TELL ME!
I know EISA can dma-burst at 33Mb/sec & MCA gets near to that.
PCI can support more dma channels than ISA and at speeds
greater than EISA.
VL-BUS ... know nothing except a note on sounblaster docs about
problems with dma channel 1 (why?).
Holy mainframes! If a video/sound card can take advantage
of those dma speed demons it is possible to use
DMA TO COPY DISPLAY PAGES with low overhead while pumping data
at maximum bus bandwidth!
Or use other deep-cruncher methods not possible with low speed dma.
OBJ FILE FORMAT
I've found on x2ftp.oulu.fi a file with the description of
the Microsoft object file format, but some things were not very clear.
EXE FILE FORMATS
In the Ralph Brown Interrupt List i found info about
COM, EXE (MZ,NE,LE,LX) and other executable formats
but lots of critical info are still missing
Where can i find more info ? Especially about the import/export
conventions?
And i'm also expecially interested about the COFF file format
(the standard unix executable file format)
for Intel processors.
As said above the future evolutions of 386P will go for overkill
with enough self-configurability to run on various environments
(from MS-DOS to Linux to a PC emulator running
into an overpowered workstation)
WINDOWS INTERNALS
In the future i want to make 386P more windows-friendly
(adding a Windows-friendly dos-extender and corollary
interface drivers), so if you know where i can get the docs
about assembler programming under Windows (95!!!!!!)
and all the Windows API docs ... tell me.
TAOS and things like that.
I'm also interested in the virtual assembly idea and all those
nice things i read months ago about Taos.
From my point of view, C or C++ are not good enough to be a
"portable system programming language", they are better than Pascal
for this kind of stuff, but not like assembler.
I program in assembly better than in C, the only thing i miss
is debugging support (but when you chase a system level bug
a plain C debugger becomes dead meat).
In the future i want to add a portable virtual assembly compiler
into 386P (this way, by just porting the 386P kernel
it is possible to migrate all the already produced stuff in a minute).
My current idea is to keep a subset of 386 opcodes and translate
the assembler sources to different cpu architectures, avoiding
to use self modifying code and byte ordering tricks
(when accessing external memory)
it becomes possible to port easily any program.
REWARDS... Oops! No rewards, except a better 386P available to all. :)