Subject: Re: Easy Assigns for IBM/Amiga Imagine?
Date: 14 May 94 13:29:58 EDT
From: John Foust - Syndesis Corporation <76004.1763@CompuServe.COM>

To: Imagine

1.  Think broadly.
2.  Emulate programs that have solved this problem already.
3.  If you don't consider yourself competent about another platform,
    then don't bother making suggestions.

First, you don't want to declare MS-DOS drive letters to be
equivalent to AmigaDOS logical assignments.  Every MS-DOS system will
be different.  Drive letters can change on the same system depending
on how they booted, which batch files they've run, which 'SUBST'
commands are in effect, which network is connected, etc.  More recent
OSes for the PC (Windows, WfW, WinNT) make it very easy to
dynamically change drive letters.

Also, every PC has a "last drive" setting.  If you don't have an
explicit 'LASTDRIVE=I' statement in your CONFIG.SYS, then you've got
a default "last drive."  Adding extra drives is not free, it consumes
valuable DOS-ish memory for every extra drive.  Most people keep
theirs to a sane value.

Other people have shown how the use of "drive letters" like L: and T:
conflict with the Amiga...

Hash's Playmation solved this in a multiplatform sort of way.
Impulse could solve it, too, with a morning's work, if they wanted to.

Playmation shows its Amiga roots by depending on logical
assignments (via 'ASSIGN') to point to model, choreography, etc.
directories.  Projects store the assignment, not the hard-coded
filename path.  

On the Windows version, they have a dialog that lets you map your
Amiga-like assignments (MODELS:) to complete MS-DOS filename paths.
These presets are stored in a configuration file that's used whenever
you make projects.  Their projects are portable to the Mac version,
too.

A few other issues need to be considered.  Macs allow filename paths,
too, except ':' is used instead of slash.  MS-DOS uses backslashes,
Amiga and Unix use forward slashes.  MS-DOS limits itself to 8.3 char
filenames, the others don't.  It's not that hard to come up with a
flexible project-parsing routine that could handle scripts from any
platform.

And please, can we stop hearing about how excited and wet you were
when your copy of Imagine was delivered, and how you anxiously left
scraps of paper from the door to the keyboard?




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