Hi all,
I'm pleased to announce ATA Support 1.0b11.
I originally planned to use this release to serve web pages during my
christmas holidays, but unfortunately, there seems to be some bad bug
in this software.
Nevertheless, I fixed three bugs for this release.
What is ATA Support?
--------------------
Newtons normally can only be used with linear cards which happen to
be hard to find and very expensive (don't come and cry that you have
data loss if you use eBay-bough-never-used-but-in-Cisco-routers
cards, and if you have a corruption of a card, there is no way to
restore your data).
ATA Support is the result of a research project leading to make
Newtons with NewtonOS 2.x use ATA cards that happen to be easy to
find and inexpensive. It is supposed to work on every US or German
2.x model, but technically, does not work very well on MP120 I have
been told and there is a nasty bug on eMates. However, it seems to be
usable, and a lot of users use it, even if I hope they do backups.
Where can I find ATA Support?
-----------------------------
Surprisingly, this can be found on my website, and more specifically here:
http://www.kallisys.com/newton/ata/
What's New?
-----------
First, I fixed the compatibility problem with cards that could not be written.
Previously, when a card was inserted, it was configured in the first
mode where it could be read. With some cards, this lead to using them
in a mode where they could not be written.
Now, when you partition a card, ATA Support looks for a proper mode
for both reading and writing (it only does this when partitionning,
for this test can be destructive). It writes this information to the
card and when a card is inserted, this information is read and used
to determine how to use the card.
I think this is the last bug fix required in the driver part, making
it compatible with most cards around. So please, if you had a problem
with a card, test this new release and send me a mail if it does not
work.
Second bug fixed is the stupid -8007 error when tapping the icon in
the Extras Drawer. In fact, when looking at the problem, I realized
that I could bypass the Newton Toolkit runtime code and hence save
some extra bytes of NewtonScript heap.
Third bug fixed is that sometimes a system dialog appeared (such as:
do you want to save new information and packages to card "Foo") and
this dialog had no icon telling you which slot it was about, and
actually, this lead to an exception (although I think you would not
see it without BugTrap installed). Now, the icon correctly appears.
What's left?
------------
Well, basically, what is left for next version is some user interface
to partition the card (it is in fact nearly finished but not part of
the demo version) and to fix this bug Alexey discovered. Anyway, I
did not want to release the final version just before leaving for one
week, so expect it next year ;)
Future plans
------------
Once I'll have fixed this bug and used successfully the 15 MB card
Matthias sent me for a week, I will release the final version as it
will have reached the state of useful software from thrill seeker toy
(also I get a message per week asking for releasing it in its current
state, I am sorry I refuse to do that until data seems to be safe)
Then, I'll work in the following directions depending on what you
would tell me you prefer:
* implement support for file systems (mostly FAT I guess)
* implement backups
* improve performances by working on the driver
* work on the brutal card removal thing
* implement more completely the driver to support ATAPI, DMA, other ATA modes
* work on reducing the memory used to be usable on MP120s
* fix the bugs on eMates
(ATA Support won't be sold to eMate/MP120 users until these two
problems are fixed).
BTW, is there any developer out there interested in working with the
SDK to implement some software accessing ATA cards? (the SDK allows
you to know about which cards are inserted and let you perform
read/write operations).
Regards,
Paul
-- Home page: http://www.kallisys.com/ Newton-powered WebServer: http://newt.dyndns.org:8080/-- This is the Newtontalk mailinglist - http://www.newtontalk.net To unsubscribe or manage: visit the above link or mailto:newtontalk-request_at_newtontalk.net?Subject=unsubscribe
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