Ever tried to find that program or file and given up, then you need DiscSCAN. It’s purpose is to make keeping track of the contents of your discs easier. It will let you find a file or program faster and easier then loading a couple of hundred discs only to find that it’s on the last disc you have to search. It does this by keeping a record of the disc's contents on a file and searching though these.
Requirements
DiscSCAN requires Risc OS 3.1 or above and cannot be run from an archive or write-protected disc. This is because DiscSCAN stores it’s data internally. It is best to run DiscSCAN from a hard drive as this will cut down on disc swapping and it will be faster, but a hard drive is not essential but you will need to swap discs a lot and I do mean a lot.
Installing DiscSCAN
To Install DiscSCAN on to a hard drive make a new sub directory and open it. Then copy the contents of this archive in to it. For installing on to a floppy disc get an empty disc and copy the contents of this archive on to it.
If you already were already using a version of DiscSCAN then it is a bit more complicated. Create a ram disc using the Task window (Select click on the Acorn and scroll the window down to the ram disc item and drag the bar out). Copy the contents of the archive to the ram disc and, with shift held down, SELECT double click on the !DiscSCAN icon and delete any files that are in the 'Files' directory. Then copy this copy of DiscSCAN over the top of your current version.
Loading DiscSCAN
To load DiscSCAN double click on the !DiscSCAN icon in it’s directory window and the DiscSCAN icon will appear on the right hand side of the icon bar.
Scanning a disc
Before DiscSCAN becomes useful you will need to scan all your discs, but you only need to scan them all once after that you only need to scan any new discs. Each disc will need to be given a unique disc code for identification later. Just like when you store discs in a disc box, DiscSCAN will allow you to sort the discs in to sections (that's if your organised).
To scan a disc, load DiscSCAN if it’s not already loaded and click SELECT on it’s icon on the icon bar. This will open up the main window. Type in the unique disc code, that you gave the disc, in to the top writable icon and press <RETURN>. In the next writable icon you can type in a description of the disc's contents to remind you of what’s on it, or you can include a description of where you got the disc from. For example 'Magazine disc', 'Public Domain', 'Back up disc', 'Acorn disc', 'Upgrade', etc....
Below these two writable icons are a set of section icons. Clicking with SELECT will select which section to put any disc you scan in to. These icons also control other parts of DiscSCAN (See below). When you are sure that all the disc code and description is correct press <RETURN> again or click SELECT on the ‘Scan’ icon.
There are two menus by the side of these two writable icons, in these menus you can put frequently used Descriptions and Disc Codes so to speed up scanning more discs later. When selected the menu item will replace the contents of the relevant icon.
Before DiscSCAN will scan a disc, it will make sure that ArcFS is loaded and that it is a version , if it is not then an error message will be shown telling you to load a new version of ArcFS. Arcfs must be set to act as a image filing system. This can be done, by running the file ‘Set_ArcFS’ from inside of !DSHelp application. The version of arcfs that DiscSCAN needs is defined in the Messages under the token ArcfsVer but which ever version you chose to use it must support the image filing system.
If everything is set up correctly then DiscSCAN will scan the disc you have chosen. The pointer will change to the hourglass and after a while the pointer will change back. The time taken to scan a disc depends on how much data is on it. A full CD Rom will take longer then a full floppy disc.
When first loaded DiscSCAN is set up to scan ADFS::0.$ you can change this by opening the main menu. To do this click MENU on the main window. From the main menu go down to the ‘Scan Path’ item and move across. A writable menu item will open and you can type in the directory you want to scan. DiscSCAN needs to be told a directory to scan, not just a disc because of the way it is programmed. It will check the directory you type before it scans it and will open up an error box if it is invalid.
Also built in to DiscSCAN are four special scanning functions. This are chosen automatically depending on the section name. The special scanning is designed for magazine discs, eg Acorn Computing, Acorn User and Archimedes World. To access the special scanning change the section name to Acorn Comp, Acorn User or Arc World respectively.(the names are case sensitive). Any other section name will use the normal disc scanning which scans all directories and archives and saves information on all the files.
Searching for an item
Once you have scanned a disc you will probably want to find a file or application on it at sometime in the future. To search for an item, load DiscSCAN if it’s not already loaded and open the main menu. Move down to ‘Search’ and go across to open up a window. From here type in the file name you want to search for and press <Return> to start the search. If you did not type anything in then DiscSCAN will tell you to type in a string to search for.
There are a couple of options you can alter before you start the search. You can chose whether or not to make the search case-sensitive. If the search is, then if you searched for ‘ABC’ then it would not find ‘Abc’, ‘ABc’, ‘aBc’, ‘abc’, etc... If you did not have the search case-sensitive then it would find all of the examples given, but will take longer to find them as it has to convert the names to lower case.
You can also chose how many sections to search. By selecting ‘All Sections’ then DiscSCAN will go through all the sections looking for the item you want to find. With ‘One Section’ selected, DiscSCAN will only search though the section that has been selected on the main window.
If the item you were searching for is found then another window will open in that window. In this window will be the full path name of the item, the disc code and description of the disc it is on and the file type of the item whether it is a Application, Directory, Draw file, Sprite file, etc.... If the item you were searching for was not found then the window will say so. Below this information is four icons ‘Retry’, ‘Continue’, ‘Stop’ nd 'Run Item'. Stop will close the window and reset everything so you can do another search. ‘Continue’ will continue the search and find the next item that matches, ‘Retry’ allows you to start the search from the beginning with the same settings. The 'Run Item' button will only be available if the disc was scanned in this version of DiscSCAN or has been altered. If you press on any of the buttons and the window has ‘Not found’ or 'Search Aborted' in it, then all of the buttons will do the same as ‘Stop’ button and reset the search system.
The Browser
The search is only useful if you can remember the whole or part of the file name, if you can’t then you will need the browser. To access the browser use the main menu and select the ‘Browser’ item. A large window will open. It will either have the contents of a disc displayed or it will have the words ‘None Entered’ at the top. If you select a different section from the main window then the browser’s display will also change to a disc from that section or it will display ‘None Entered’. To change the display to another disc you can either enter a number in to the writable icon at the top and press <RETURN> or you can also use the icons in the window pane to the left of the window, to move between discs until you reach the first or last one.
IMPORTANT : DiscSCAN has to go though the entire contents of a disc record before it can display it. This is to speed up the scrolling, however if you are trying to display the contents of a CD Rom or Hard Drive with a lot of entries on it can take a while so please be patient.
You can also ‘Save’, ‘Alter or ’Delete‘ a record. To get to these functions you will need to open up the browser menu by clicking with MENU on the browser. The ’Alter‘ and ’Delete‘ items are in the ’Edit‘ submenu. If you select the ’Alter‘ item then a window will open with the disc code, description and the original scan path in it. You can then change these and click on the Alter button to make the change or click on Cancel to close the window without making any changes. The ’Delete‘ item will ask for confirmation on whether or not to ’Delete‘ the record just incase you want to keep it.
The save window has five options to chose from. You can ‘Save All’ or just the record being displayed, ‘Save Depth’ so that the items are indented and ‘Save Types’ so that the items have there file types after them. With ‘Save Types’ selected you can then chose whether to ‘Convert Types’. When selected the item stored will have the type ‘Draw file’ or ‘Sprite file’, etc .... With it not selected then they will have the type ‘AFF’, ‘FF9’, etc ..... You can also chose whether or not to save the file sizes as well.
Below the Edit submenu is the Display menu. In the Display menu there is 'Convert', ‘Depth’, ‘File types’ or ‘File sizes’. With depth selected the display is indented, with file types selected then the file type will be shown after the file name and with File sizes selected the file size will be shown on the left hand side of the display. The convert item will toggle whether DiscSCAN will change the file types in to a text description. It is useful when you have a display of a disc with a lot of sub-directories as you can toggle it off so that the file sizes will be displayed properly.
The display can be coloured by opening the Colours sub-menu. Under the Colours submenu are 'Title data', ‘Applications’, ‘Directories’, ‘Archives’ or ‘Files’. From each of these menus is a submenu with 16 colours in it and you can define what colour the items are shown in.
I prefer to use:
Title data 7 (Black)
Applications 8 (Dark Blue)
Directories 10 (Light Green)
Archives 13 (Dark Green)
Files 11 (Red)
Options
To open the options window you have to open the icon bar menu and select the options item. The option window has twelve writable icons each containing the name of one of the sections. These names can be changed and saved. To the left is four action icons. ‘Save’ will save the options for the next time DiscSCAN is loaded, 'Cancel' will close the window and make no changes and 'Default' will reload the options that DiscSCAN was using at the beginning. The 'Use' icon will make the changes only until DiscSCAN is quit.
Below these icons is a Miscellaneous box which has 'Max Discs', 'Link Browser and Search' and 'Open Title Window'. The 'Max Discs' options is the maximum number of discs that the browser can display. If this number is too low then an error message will be shown when the browser is open or when the section is changed in the main window. Changing this number will not make any changes until the options are saved and DiscSCAN reloaded. The 'Link Browser and Search' decides whether or not the browser, if it is open, will switch to the section and disc that the file or application found was stored in. It is best to have this feature disabled if DiscSCAN is running from a floppy disc as it will slow the search down a lot.
There are also two files that you can be alter, they are both in the ‘Resources’ directory in !DiscSCAN. The first file is the ‘Menus’ file. You can add or remove items from the disc code menu and from the description menu. There must be at least one item in each menu or DiscSCAN will not load. The other file is the ‘Messages’ file, the bottom part of this file is filled with the file types that DiscSCAN has text descriptions for. If you decide to add a file type to the list then must be above the ‘???:File type is &%0’ line. It must also be in the format <File type>:<Text Description> for DiscSCAN to recognise it.
Key Presses
To speed up the use of DiscSCAN there are a number of key presses
Key Window What it does
F4 Any Opens search window.
Ctrl F2 Any Will close the window which the input focus was in.
Ctrl B Any Opens Browser window.
Ctrl O Any Opens Data on Sections window.
Return Any Activate default action.
Shift Escape Main Select section 1.
Shift F1 to F11 Main Select section 2 to 12.
F1 Search Toggles Case-Sensitive.
F2 Search Selects ‘All Sections’ search.
F3 Search Selects ‘One Section’ search.
Escape Search Aborts the search.
F3 Browser Opens up Save window.
Ctrl A Browser Opens alter record window.
Ctrl C Browser Toggles Convert types
Ctrl D Browser Toggles Display Depth
Ctrl F Browser Toggles show File types.
Ctrl S Browser Toggles show File sizes.
Ctrl X Browser Deletes record.
Bugs and problems
There are a number of problems with DiscSCAN the biggest problem is when you are using a piece of software that gives the filer long file names over 10 characters. When you scan the directory with the long file names in it will scan correctly and will be displayed in the browser correctly but the search will fail. This is because basic only allows strings (text) to be a maximum length of 256 characters and if the full path name of one file is over that then basic returns the error 'String too long'. This will happen even if the file does not match the one you are looking for as for DiscSCAN to give the full path name of a file it has too work them all out.
If ArcFS has the app archives option set, and an archives name begins with an ! then DiscSCAN will not scan inside it. To scan them you will need to unset the app archives option by clicking with SELECT on the arcfs filer icon on the icon bar and then on the app. archives option window. With the scanning system changing in the next version this problem should disappear.
Previous versions
0.80 : First released version
0.85 : Added a few more key presses.
Reorganised menus.
Fixed file format bug.
Fixed redraw and browser bugs.
Added file sizes to saved file and convert types to browser display. Saved file can be same as displayed.
Added check to find out if text description was too long in the browser.
Linked browser and search.
Added Abort function to search.
Added menu ticks.
Fixed bug in search when applications are used as directories.
Fixed key press error in browser.
Added section file sizes to info on sections window.
Added 'Run Item' to found window and alter 'Scan Path' in to alter window.
More file types in the Messages file (about 300 now)
And a hell of a lot of bug fixes that should have been done before but I did not discover till I sent the first version off.
Next Version and beyond
In a future version of DiscSCAN I want to added the following. Just don't hold your breath as it will take a while.
• Support for long file names with OS patches.
• Double clicking with SELECT will open a window with the full path name of the file or application in it with an option to run it.
• Improve browser so that you can chose whether or not to display applications, directories, archives or files.
• Remove special disc scanning and replace with a new system.
• Add an option to link Browser and main window automatically or using 'Update' button on the tool pane.
• Add Wipe section option.
• Remove need for ArcFS too be loaded until an archive is found.
• Change options window.
• Support DOS file extensions without the Dosmap command as DiscSCAN does at present, thanks to Risc OS.
• Remove 12 section limit.
• Add 'Move' function to the Edit submenu.
• Add 'Update' function to the Edit submenu.
• Multi tasking error boxes.
• Remove max discs restriction
• Improve alter procedure make faster.
If you have anything you want to see added tell me.
Copyright and Disclaimer (the boring bit)
Copyright: This program has been put in to the Public Domain as FreeWare. This means that DiscSCAN can be freely copied as long as only media and distribution costs are charged for. I, the author, retain full copyright over the program and it may not be altered (except for the Menus and Messages files) or distributed in any different form.
This program was developed with routines written by A.P. Senior as provided with the book BASIC Wimp Programming published by Dabs Press and they have been included in the main !RunImage file so that they can be compressed and are not the copyright of the author.
Disclaimer: I, the author, do not accept any liability for the loss or damage to computer or data stored on one, however caused, arising as a result of the use or misuse of this program. So don't blame me!!
Contacting the author
If you find any bugs or have any suggestions for things that could be added to DiscSCAN. Then please contact me at;
