home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Night Owl 6
/
Night Owl's Shareware - PDSI-006 - Night Owl Corp (1990).iso
/
001a
/
tm70beta.zip
/
BETA.DOC
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1991-08-14
|
10KB
|
225 lines
Revision 7.00 beta
Good news, lots of nice internal changes that may solve some
of the problems Pcboard and Wildcat have when dealing with
external protocols.
Now for the bad news, yes there is some. I got three
programs, two in the mail and one uploaded to the BBS. The
two in the mail were the same program, sent by different
people.
Both programs generated semi-registered Tmodem keys.
I really wasn't surprised to see them. I've been expecting it
for 2 years now. The only thing that surprised me was that it
took so long, protection's generally only good for about a
year and Tmodem wasn't that heavily protected to start with.
So, you'll need to get a NEW key for 7.00. The sysop of
VETlink # (314 334-6359) has a list of all the registered
Tmodem people and he can fix you a new key.
Restart aborted Transfers
Prior versions of Tmodem would not allow this in NON-
REGISTERED mode.
I've decided to allow that in 7.00. You're restricted to NON-
BATCH transfers and that should be enough.
Information I left out of the Doc's
I don't think I every told anyone HOW to abort a transfer
once it got started, at least I don't REMEMBER putting it in
the doc's.
To abort, sending or receiving, just press ESC. Now, you will
not drop out RIGHT away. Tmodem will not abort while it's in
the middle of sending or receiving until it hits a chaining
byte. It CAN take upwards to 5 or 6 seconds before you'll
actual exit the program.
Ctrl-x
The SENDER could not be aborted (with ctrl-x) prior to actual
starting the send, it had to time out. That's been corrected
and if you send 4 or more ctrl-x's BEFORE a send starts, the
SENDER will abort the session.
Zero byte files
The RECEIVER would get confused if the file it was about to
receive already existed on the disk and had 0 file length.
Duplicate Skips
There was some problems with some of the highspeed modems,
the skip request wasn't seen by the other end. It had
something to do with the skip character sequence that was
soaked up by the senders modem before getting to the
software. That's been corrected by changing the skip sequence
and giving it more muscle.
Phasing Errors
This is when the parameters you pass Tmodem aren't accurate
and the SEND/RECEIVE algorithms of the two system don't
match. Ninty precent of the time, this is the CONNECT baud
rate since it's about the ONLY one I can't TRAP.
I've added some more routines to the BRAIN functions that
SHOULD be able to handle this, BUT it does mean that you MAY
not be sending/receiving at maximum speed.
Tmodem will have to make some GUESSES to determine what needs
to be done and guesses aren't always right.
Even when it's wrong, the transfer will still take place, but
you'll MAY not be sending/receiving as fast as you could if
Tmodem DID have the right information to start with.
If you see "Error RT6000 : Phase Shifting!" appear on your
screen, you'll know that either or both of you have incorrect
/B parameters.
The receiver will only get the message under certain
conditions.
e.g. if the sender is at 9600 pbs but the receiver is at
1200, then it's safe to assume that the sender is the one
with the problem. I'll not alarm the receiver with the phase
shifting error message because there isn't anything he can do
about it anyway, the protocol will just have to handle it.
That's not a 100 pecent sure fire method, you could lock at
19200 and pass 1200 to Tmodem ALL the time and the RECEIVER
WOULD be at fault. I'm going to ASSUME that isn't going to
happen and if it does, someone is just TESTING. AND sooner or
later THEY will be the sender and it'll show up then.
The SENDER will ALWAYS display the phase shifting error
message. I'm assuming that the SENDER will be a BBS 99
percent of the time and the SYSOP can use that to help his
callers DEBUG their setups.
The tmodem log file will also have the phase shifting error
message written to it so a BBS sysop can make that log
viewable from his BBS (providing his BBS is capable of that).
This should allow BBS programs that don't handle the
highspeed modems correctly, Pcboard/Wildcat, to use Tmodem
without resorting to multiple batch files or special
interface programs.
Command line switch, -X
The -X use to TURN off the TMODEM.LOG file. You can no longer
turn it off, but you can pick the name of the log and you can
include drive/path.
e.g.
-XC:\Telix\Tmodem.log
-XC:\Pcboard\pcb.log
Command line switches, -F and -@ {Send Files}
These are no longer used and have been replaced with
-S<BLANK SPACE> {@}FILENAME
If the filename begins with @, it is considered to be a
CONTROL file and Tmodem will get the names of the files to
send from it.
Send this file: -S C:\Osiris\files\filarea1\tmod640
USE this control file: -S @c:\Osiris\send1.ctl
Samples:
If your BBS appends the @ to the start of the Ctrl file
name and passes it to the batch file in %3 then you'd do:
-S %3
If your BBS does NOT append the @ to the start of the ctrl
file, then you would do:
-S @%3
If your BBS program does NOT append the @ to the start of the
ctrl file name and it intermixes the two formats,ie. file
names and control file names, then not only are you up the
proverbial shit creek, you're knee deep in it.
To give that even more flexibility, you can even re-define
the '@' sign to what every character your BBS or Terminal
program uses.
The command line switch to alter the @ control file symbol is
'-@<CHAR>' with <CHAR> being the NEW control file symbol.
e.g. -B%1 -P%2 -@# -S %3
# is now the new control file symbol.
Use SLOW FLow control switch.
The old switch was -S which is NOW used for SEND FILES. The
NEW slow flow control switch is -F
SpeedUp
The entire program has been speeded up quite a bit and the
speed up was for some future additions to the program that
may require faster code to offset the additional CPU
overhead.
If you're running an XT, 6/8 Mzh AT, or you're running under
Desqview AND you're attempting to push a highspeed modem AND
you were not already getting the maximum the modem was
capable of doing then you may see an increase.
Virus Protection
That's only available in registered mode.
The virus checker is now coded in ASM and the EXE file size
is back down.
TMODEM.KEY
Of course, there is a key system and it's in two parts
(Double Encoded).
Part 1: The Tmodem.key is encoded using twin passwords and
those passwords HAVE to be provided by you, using either of
two methods listed below, and no two SETS of passwords are
alike.
Part 2: Once the TMODEM.KEY file has been decoded, the data
WITHIN the file must be decoded. Tmodem itself can decode
that part ONCE you've told it HOW to get the data out of the
file.
How to provide the passwords
You have two methods of providing the passwords. You can do
it on the command line by using
-$FIRST_PASSWORD:SECOND_PASSWORD
DOS uses the space character to delimit command line
arguments so you'll place a COLON between the two passwords.
The second method is to use the environment variable
$TSR$=FIRST_PASSWORD:SECOND_PASSWORD
NOTE: BETA VERSION REQUIRES the environment variable be used.